


every day up ‘til now will resound like recompense

by statusquo_ergo



Series: no matter your sin, i'll shoulder it for you [1]
Category: Suits (TV)
Genre: M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, Panic Attacks, Post-Prison, Prison, Psychological Drama, Solitary Confinement, Tumblr: marveysecretsanta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 01:25:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8824627
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/statusquo_ergo/pseuds/statusquo_ergo
Summary: When Harvey is unable to get Mike out of prison early, the boys have to figure out how they can each survive the time of his incarceration; the aftermath when he gets out is another matter entirely.For heartsuits.





	

“Watch your back in there, Mike.”

Mike looks back for an unreasonable period of time, the sunlight shining in his eyes making him squint and casting precise shadows across his face that give him a general appearance of weariness, and he nods as an afterthought. Barely noticeable.

“I will.”

Harvey crosses his left foot over his right and puts his hands in his pants pockets, leaning back against the car door as he watches him go.

Bye, Mike.

Good luck.

There’ll be a light burning in the window for you.

\---  
**WEEK 1**  
\---

_You shouldn’t trust anybody in here._

He ought to know that by now.

Mike lies flat on his back in the dark, tossing an imaginary baseball at the ceiling and trying to ignore the bed spring jutting against his kidney, the cold stench of old plaster, packed flesh and greasy pillowcases and Simple Green.

Remember: Prison isn’t for making friends. Prison is for learning your lesson, prison is for making amends to the society you’ve so badly wronged.

Like hell it is.

Prison is for putting on a show, so the big bad wolves of the police department can brandish their shiny shields and flash their laminated badges and say “Look what we did! Look who we put away where he won’t bother you anymore!”

Look at the mess we’re fixing.

The imaginary ball hits Mike’s forehead and imaginary drops down to the grimy floor.

_I did such a good job, no one in here is ever gonna notice._

How could he have fallen for such a stupid stunt? The computers at Danbury don’t have any photo manipulation software installed, much less access to the Internet, and still he bought it when Gallo bragged about mocking up nude photos of Rachel to pass around to his perverse friends.

Mike presses the heels of his palms to his eyes.

He didn’t fall for it. Not exactly. Not in the way that Gallo and everyone else thinks he did, at least. But the excuse was so convenient, so _there;_ just the right time, just the right target. So now he’s got a write-up in his file (and all the supplementary disrespect and embarrassment) and a two week suspension to his visitation privileges (and all the supplementary shame and loneliness). And kitchen duty, don’t forget that part.

Awesome.

Mike rolls over toward the wall, away from Kevin, and closes his eyes.

Just hold on, Mike, he tells himself. Hold onto everything that makes you who you are. You’ve got one hundred and forty-six other options.

_Sleep with your rifle._

Good advice.

\---

The sky is awfully clear tonight.

Ought to be cooler this time of year, but, you know. Climate change and everything. Welcome to the future.

Mike probably isn’t thinking about that right now. Whatever he’s doing. It probably isn’t that.

Harvey tilts the rocks glass in his hand and watches light catch on the scotch lapping at the edges. Four fingers, a generous portion. Glass two of TBD.

It’s been that kind of week.

The Williamsburg Bridge glows orange and white, light skittering across the gently churning current underneath. The jagged black and blue skyline is more industrial, more corporate than he usually thinks appropriate of Brooklyn.

Harvey wishes his balcony faced the other way.

\---

Mike walks into the peeling blue visiting room with a dark bruise on his left cheekbone and a confident swagger in his step that melts away the moment the door clicks shut.

“What are you doing here?” he asks indignantly.

Harvey takes his hands out of his pockets and arches one of his eyebrows.

“What do you mean, what am I doing here?” he mimics. “I want to know what’s going on.”

What a stupid question. This is prison, it’s not hard to guess; even if things aren’t as amusingly dramatic as they are on TV, the general malaise isn’t too far off, and Mike knows for a fact that the stain on his face hasn’t faded so much as darkened overnight, to say nothing of the larger one under his ribcage.

He laughs ironically.

“It wasn’t me who pissed him off,” he says, the corner of his mouth quirking up as he raises his eyes from the aluminum table between them to catch Harvey’s glare.

Pause for effect.

“It was you.”

Harvey isn’t in the mood to play, the killjoy.

“What are you talking about?”

“Frank Gallo,” Mike says as though it explains everything. The color draining from Harvey’s face confirms that it does, which is both a comfort and a curse.

“Holy shit,” Harvey says, partly to himself. “What’s he doing in here?”

Not helping.

“I put him away for racketeering.”

It’s even less encouraging that Harvey seems as baffled as Mike is. RICO law was originally crafted to break up organized criminal cartels; Gallo doesn’t belong in Danbury, Club Fed. He should be serving twenty to life in Colorado supermax.

Mike’s cheekbone throbs a pointed reminder.

He should be, but he’s not.

“Where are you going?” he demands as Harvey raises his arm to bang on the door.

“I’m gonna go tell the warden,” Harvey says. “Tell him the whole story.” ( **Visiting Restrictions:** Each inmate having a visit must assume responsibility for proper conduct of their visitor during the visit.)

It’s as though Harvey has never been to prison before.

“These guards are corrupt,” Mike says. “You go to the warden, it gets back to Gallo, he’s gonna come at me twice as hard.”

Harvey levels him a dry look that Mike recognizes immediately. He’s weighed the pros and cons of his potential actions and made an executive decision based on every available factor short of actual sentiment. (No room for that brand of bullshit in here.)

“It’s one week instead of two years,” he says flatly.

In all the time they’ve known each other, Mikes has rarely wanted so badly to hit him. ( **Visiting Restrictions:** Handshaking, embracing and kissing will be permitted **ONLY** at the beginning and at the end of the visit. Physical contact, to include hand-holding, is not permitted during the visit.)

“Goddammit, Harvey!” ( **Visiting Restrictions:** No loud, boisterous talk or profane language will be allowed inside the Visiting Room.) “Are you gonna cut my legs out from under me?”

This isn’t one of your backroom deals, Harvey. This isn’t something you can close.

Mike hopes and prays for him to understand; “I don’t want your help” is always a devastating thing to hear, but please, please listen.

“I won’t go to the warden,” Harvey says.

There are holes in that promise big enough to drive a semi through.

Mike nods his thanks all the same.

Harvey will fix it.

\---

Kevin is a good guy, Mike tells himself for the hundred thousand millionth time, wrapping a damp used bandage around the shallow cut Gallo somehow managed to slip him in the day room, on his way to the toilet. Kevin is a good guy. We should stick together, we should look out for each other. You need friends to survive in prison. Kevin is a good guy.

Kevin put you right in Gallo’s sightline, Mike reminds himself sternly. Kevin might’ve dealt cocaine, he might’ve run a human trafficking ring, he might’ve produced child pornography. No, in that case he’d be dead by now, probably, but still.

Kevin is a good guy.

(Says who?)

It has to be true. It does.

(I need it to be.)

Kevin is a good guy.

\---

“Cahill needs you to inform on your cellmate.”

Mike responds on autopilot, retaining as much of his old self as he can scrape together under the harsh fluorescents.

“This is my only friend in here.” (Kevin is a good guy.) “I’m not going to betray him.”

(You mean like he betrayed you?)

He didn’t know me, that doesn’t count.

(And he knows you now?)

“There’s someone in here trying to kill you,” Harvey snaps, and Mike remembers that there are people in the world who are invested in his survival for reasons more eloquent than personal gain. “I’m giving you a way out,” Harvey begs, and Mike remembers that Harvey is at the head of that pack.

“It’s about giving you a chance to get your life back while it still looks the same,” Harvey implores, and Mike remembers that Harvey is deathly afraid of losing the people he loves.

Are you gonna take it, Mike?

Are you?

\---

It’s another late night at the office.

Might’ve been nice to watch the sunset, but, well. That’s the other side of the building, and anyway, it was about an hour ago, so.

Mike probably doesn’t get to see any sunsets. However he spends his nights. He probably doesn’t do that.

Harvey stands with his hands on the Ewing basketball and looks down Third Avenue.

Cahill didn’t even demand a reason when he promised, however begrudgingly, to pull yet another set of strings in his endless web to sneak Mike out of prison for a night. He should have, but he didn’t, because he wants this deal to go through just badly enough to believe any plan fed to him in a convincing tone of voice, and he thinks he knows Mike (he doesn’t) and he thinks he knows Harvey (only sort of) and he doesn’t know Rachel (all the better). But Harvey knows. Harvey knows that Mike wears his bleeding heart on his sleeve, and if anything can convince him to rat on his disposable cellmate, it’s a reminder of the fiancée he’s missing.

Harvey turns the ball under his palms and sighs. He knows that carrying out this plan will take more than a couple of strings.

They’re doomed from the start, but it’s too late to back out now.

Harvey knows.

\---

Mike slams his hands down on the aluminum table.

“You _drugged_ me?”

“We needed a cover for why you’re not in your cell,” Harvey dismisses without so much as a wince. “This was the only way to do it.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t do it, did you?” Mike hisses, trying to keep his voice low. “You drugged me, _you,_ and for what? I’m still here, my cell’s—thirty yards that way, and now Gallo’s gonna think I’m gunning for him because I think he tried to poison me!”

Harvey rolls his eyes. “You don’t think that.”

“He doesn’t know that!”

Mike’s breathing is labored, his muscles tense and ready to spring at the slightest provocation, fuck the code of conduct. Harvey unbuttons his jacket and sits, smooths his pants legs, and waits.

Keep a lid on it, rookie.

Shaking his head, Mike speaks through gritted teeth.

“What did you think was gonna happen?”

This had better be pretty fucking good.

He clenches his hands into fists, and waits.

“Cahill pulled some strings,” Harvey explains, standing after a beat, rebuttoning his jacket as he does and brushing rust from his thighs. “Called in some favors with the prison doctor and the warden to put something in your food so we could sneak you out for the night.” He shrugs, unable to bring himself to look Mike in the eye. “I was going to take you home to see Rachel for a few hours, I figured spending some alone time with the woman you love might…convince you to take the deal.”

For all the effort that went in, for all the bullshit they had to spin, it sure sounds simple laid out like that; for a second, Harvey wonders where they could’ve gone wrong.

Then Mike laughs deliriously.

“Harvey. That’s the worst plan I’ve ever heard.”

Well, yeah, maybe, but still.

Harvey puts on his angriest veneer and pretends he feels self-righteous.

“I didn’t have a lot of options,” he grinds out. “Mike, I’d really like to be able to tell you I can keep Gallo off your back, but it’s not true and you know it. And I know you’re not totally defenseless, but you’ve seen it! The guards don’t care about anyone but themselves, Gallo can do whatever he wants!”

It’s been a long time since Mike was the kind of person who would fit in in prison. Mike knows it, even if he won’t admit it; Harvey does too, even if he doesn’t want to.

“I didn’t know you were so indebted to Cahill,” Mike taunts.

Harvey falls back to his seat and claws his hand through his perfectly coiffed hair.

How can you not understand?

“It’s not about Cahill,” Harvey says wearily. “It was never about Cahill, Mike, I don’t care about him, or his goddamn docket. I don’t care about Kevin or any of that shit.”

The guard in the hall bangs the butt of his baton against the door. Language, Mr. Specter.

Mike leans back in his chair, holding onto the edge of the table to keep from tipping over.

“Why would you take such a stupid risk?” he asks. “I’m guilty, Harvey, I committed fraud and it took awhile, but I got caught. I mean, how long were we playing with house money, anyway, five years? Our luck was bound to run out. So you know, thanks for trying, but if you just leave me in here, then they’re not gonna come after you.”

The guard peeks in through the window as things get quiet, and Harvey puts his head in his hands.

“I took the risk because I’m out of ideas,” he says to the floor. “I’m out of ideas and I need you to take this deal, Mike, because you were gonna be found innocent and you’re in here anyway, and I… It’s not right.”

Harvey Specter looks out for his own.

Mike lets go of the table, the legs of his chair skidding against the concrete, and smiles even though Harvey doesn’t see.

“There's a time for daring and there's a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for.”

Harvey laughs.

“When have I ever said I was a wise man?”

The chair legs skid farther back and Harvey raises his head as Mike stands, offering his hand.

“I’ll think about it,” he says.

Shake on it.

\---

Mike shoves the phone under his pillow just in time to hide it from the guard strolling down the hall. It’s a funny instinct, considering how brazenly he sat on top of his bedcovers not five minutes ago, chatting with his fiancée in thinly veiled terminology about the life they’re going to share at a point not too far off on the horizon.

Mike finds their wild speculations to be pretty boring, but the dull fantasies make her laugh, and he appreciates her lack of ulterior motives.

Take the deal, she said. I miss you. I want you to come home.

He thanked her and forgot to mention that he’d already decided before he placed the call.

It’s nearly midnight, he imagines, curling up with his back to the wall and smiling to himself. It might take some effort, but Kevin will talk to Mike. People like talking to Mike; he’s a nice guy. Definitely. The last two weeks have been absolute hell, and Gallo is still on his case, but tomorrow, tomorrow he’ll talk to Kevin. Then he’ll talk to Harvey, who will make everything better.

Tomorrow.

\---  
**WEEK 3**  
\---

The prison is a riot.

A group of former cartel runners shout obscenities at a pair of truly stupid money launderers who had no idea what they were in for when they hollered across the day room that those dirty streetwalkers don’t belong in minimum security with us upstanding bastards. Off to the side, leaning against the door to the Tower at the center of this broken down panopticon, a couple of guards giggle to each other and don’t even try to shut them up. Suddenly everyone is getting in on the fun and a saner man would go mad trying to listen to his own thoughts.

The prison is always a riot.

Mike can’t hear a single word.

The algorithm, he told Harvey. Kevin wrote the algorithm his father-in-law was using to gather intel for his insider trading practice. He didn’t want to help, but his wife was involved somehow and…and…

“Mike.”

He looks up. Harvey purses his lips.

“Mike, I’m so sorry.”

Sorry.

Did you really expect this to work? Because I didn’t.

(Didn’t you?)

Harvey puts his hands in his lap and clasps them to keep from grabbing Mike’s.

“I’ll talk to Cahill,” he says fervently, “I’ll make him reinstate the deal. I’ll make him. You held up your end, this is good info. He can’t just back out like this.”

Come on, Harvey. Yes he can.

“Did you get it in writing?” Mike asks coolly, as if that wouldn’t entirely defeat the purpose of working under the table.

Harvey won’t insult them both by pretending this is anything but what it is.

(It’s okay, Mike thinks. I know you didn’t.)

“Did you ever think,” Mike asks then, “that if you imagined or believed in something hard enough, it would come true? Just because you really wanted it?”

The chair legs scrape against the concrete as Harvey shoves away from the table, standing with his back to Mike and his head tilted down.

“I used to think that,” Mike says with a grin in his voice. “For like a year, when I was a teenager. A couple years after my parents died. I thought that if I believed in myself, I mean really believed as hard as I possibly could, everything would just…fall into place. I’m not sure I knew exactly what that would look like, or, you know, what I was hoping would happen, but man, I was convinced.”

Harvey breathes in deep and holds the fetid air in his lungs.

Mike leans back in his chair and looks up at the ceiling.

On the other side of the door, the prison riots.

The little tales we tell ourselves are false.

Today is just another day.

\---

Mike needs to remember to set his phone to vibrate.

“Rachel,” he says with a grin as he picks up her call. They haven’t spoken in a few days; law school must be even rougher than he thought.

“Hi Mike,” she says, far too cheerful. Well, that’s kind of a buzzkill; do you remember that I’m dying in here?

“How’s it going?” he ventures, listening to the scratch of a ballpoint across notepaper as she cradles the phone between her ear and shoulder. Presumably.

“Mike, I need your help.”

Irony upon ironies.

“What can I do?” he asks. (Yes, thank you, it’ll be nice to have purpose for a few minutes.)

She regales him with the Tale of Leonard Bailey, Wrongly Convicted (Or Was He?), and he listens attentively, making scandalized noises at all the right times and scornful noises at all the wrong ones. He wonders why she’s telling him all these details and wonders if it’s mostly out of habit.

“Sounds like a hell of a case,” he says when she finishes. “What do you need?”

“Mike,” she says earnestly, “I need you to tell me what it’s like to be in prison.”

Oh.

Yeah, of course.

Mike drums his fingers erratically against his thigh.

“It’s rough,” he says, the understatement of the century. She sighs.

“I figured.”

You don’t know the half of it.

“It tries to break you,” he says, feeling tough enough to bear it for the moment. “The whole system. The guards don’t—care about you, at all, unless they’re tallying the morning count and they can chalk you up for a hundred bucks a day. Inmates stick to their own in, in groups; it’s kind of like high school, but, you know. What isn’t, right.” He laughs; isn’t this ridiculous? (She doesn’t seem to think so.) “You just gotta find people you can count on. People who won’t screw you over, who’ll watch your back.” He bites down on another chuckle, nearly cuts his lip. “Anyone who isn’t working for Gallo.”

Rachel hums contemplatively.

“That doesn’t sound as bad as I was imagining,” she says, sounding disappointed.

His grip loosens, the phone knocking against his jawbone. So that’s what he gets for trying to spare her feelings, then. Alright.

Alright.

“They try to pull your soul out through your eyes,” he says flatly. “We’re living in a rotten warehouse in the middle of some scrapyard no one’s bothered to mine for parts in years because they all know everything’s gone to shit. People make wagers on the stupidest shit you can imagine and pay each other with favors and off-brand Oreos and clean underwear and travel-size tubes of toothpaste because there’s nothing in here more valuable, and if you can’t pay, you can bet your ass that your blood is gonna be sprayed all across the pavement tomorrow morning, and you better hope your bones are showing through the skin if you want anybody in Medical to give you more than a couple Ibuprofen.”

He imagines her scandalized expression and has a hard time caring, a harder time stopping.

“You think anyone’s worried about rehabilitation?” he accuses, as though this is somehow her fault. “About ‘re-integrating us into society’? The computers here are from the early 90s, the technical training equipment is about as likely to give you tetanus as it is to work properly, and the counselor’s main job is keeping us from trying to complain too high up the ladder. You wanna know what I’ve learned so far?”

“Mike—”

“I’ve learned to eat bologna on soggy Wonder bread for lunch every goddamn day without complaining,” he lists. “I’ve learned how to make alcohol strong enough to kill me from bread crusts and oranges. I’ve learned which guards will look the other way if I’ve got a buddy on the outside who wants to sneak me in a dime bag and which ones will throw me into solitary for looking at them funny. I’ve learned to follow the rules and stay out of debt to keep from being beaten with a pack of razorblades tied to a cord on a stick, or having my ribs broken under some bastard’s heel. I’ve learned how to make earplugs out of shower shoes and toothpaste caps and survive sleeping three hours a night with one eye open while twelve hundred douchebags are banging up and down their cells making enough of a racket to drown out a bomb going off because the noise never stops, Rachel, it’s never, ever, quiet.”

He imagines he hears her labored breathing, imagines her holding the phone away from her ear. Imagines he’s stunned her into silence.

Knows this is why she hasn’t come to visit.

He listens to her clear her throat. Then again.

“Thank you, Mike.” Deep breath now, deep breath. “That was…more helpful than you could possibly know.”

He sighs and drops his head back against the wall. Feels almost like a concussion, but not quite.

“Good luck on your case,” he says as the silence stretches out.

She hums again, and he envisions the smile that goes along with it.

“I love you.”

He tosses the phone up in the air and catches it in one hand; presses it back to his ear.

“Yeah.”

Thanks for that.

\---  
**WEEK 4**  
\---

Their visits shouldn’t be cloaked in attorney-client privilege; it’s just a precaution to avoid using up Mike’s visitation points (not that anyone else wants them), but the reflex to cheat the system hasn’t waned since Mike went away for his crime, and this is really all they have left. It’s not much, but Mike likes to think it keeps his instincts sharp.

Harvey smiles when Mike arrives at the visiting room, the door slamming shut behind him. It’s not a particularly happy smile, but it’s something. Familiar.

“What’s wrong?” asks Mike, who wasn’t expecting the meeting. Harvey waves at him to sit.

“Have you spoken to Rachel recently?” he returns, and Mike’s stomach twists anxiously.

“No,” he admits. It’s been a few days. “Why, is everything okay? Is she okay?”

Harvey shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it, she’s fine.” He smiles again at a private thing, an unfunny joke, before he looks Mike in the eye.

“Jessica’s moving to Chicago.”

Oddly enough, the thought that leaps to mind is that Harvey is losing the last (and the oldest, maybe the strongest) beam of his support network right when he needs it the most.

Then Mike remembers that Jessica is the managing partner of the currently collapsing law firm where Harvey works, the law firm that’s collapsing with Mike’s fingerprints all over it, and the weight of her decision crushes part of his resilience because somehow, somehow, this is his fault.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I—I wish I could’ve…”

Something.

Harvey shakes his head. “This was her decision, she’s doing what’s best for her.” (It’s not your fault, Mike, don’t pretend that it is.) “I wished her well.”

Right.

“So now what,” Mike asks rhetorically. Harvey shrugs.

“Now Louis and I have our work cut out for us,” he says. “We’ll survive. We’ll find a way. Take on extra pro bono for awhile, rebuild our reputation, maybe.” He smiles, his eyes crinkling like he means it. “We’ll figure it out.”

Mike wonders if Harvey is having much success in convincing himself. Whatever he needs to do to get through this, it’s fine; good luck to him.

“If there’s anything I can do to help,” Mike offers, even though there isn’t. Harvey’s exhale becomes a pacifying chuckle.

“It’d be great to have you back. We could really use you.”

Mike smiles appreciatively and wonders if he should be hurt by the joke. Wonders more privately if it’s even a joke at all.

Harvey stands, holding out his hand.

“Thanks, Mike.”

They shake for an unreasonably long time.

“Good luck.”

“You too.”

Thanks; I’ll need it.

\---  
**WEEK 13**  
\---

“Good morning, Michael.”

Gallo sits across the table and shoves Mike’s watery oatmeal aside as he smirks like he’s just found an ace in the hole. Mike rolls his eyes and pretends not to be concerned, hoping Kevin comes back with his breakfast in the next ten seconds.

“What do you want?”

“What makes you think I want something?”

Mike looks around for Gallo’s favorite bodyguards and doesn’t find them. So Gallo’s feeling cheeky today, pretending to be some kind of psychologist; good thing, too. The lashes on Mike’s back are still healing. (He’ll fight back next time.)

“Call it a hunch.”

“Oh, I was just wondering,” Gallo trails off, looking to the ceiling with something close to innocence; he isn’t able to hold the façade for long.

“Just wondering if you’ve spoken to your girl recently.”

Abruptly, Mike remembers that he never told Rachel about that first night, about using Gallo’s cell phone to call her, and wonders what kind of messages Gallo has been sending.

“Last night,” he lies easily. “But thanks for your concern.”

Gallo chuckles, shaking his head. “Nice try, kiddo. She’s been counting the days since you last got in touch; what’s it been now, twenty?”

It’s been twenty-one, and Gallo knows it, too, Mike can tell. He glares as maliciously as he can.

“What’s it to you?”

“Hey,” Gallo says, holding up his hands, “nothing to me. But you know what a person can do in this day and age with something as simple as a couple of cell phones? The GPS tracker alone is worth the price of admission.”

Mike has a sudden vision of Rachel laid spread eagle on their bed as a faceless thug beats her with a stocking full of marbles. His oatmeal splatters to the floor as he takes Gallo’s neck in his hands, squeezing as hard as he can, ramming his thumbs up into Gallo’s thyroids and reveling in the sound of his choking; Gallo doesn’t even try to defend himself, the coward.

“You leave her alone,” he snarls.

“Hey, hey!”

Kevin’s voice sounds just as a couple pairs of strong arms wrap around Mike’s shoulders, yanking him back, and a baton stabs him in the armpit.

“What do you think you’re doing?” one of the guards snaps; it’s too early for this, and he’s already tired.

“Get your head outta your ass,” the other says as Gallo leers smugly, rubbing his throat for show.

“Assaulting any person,” the first guard says, quoting right out of the Admission and Orientation Handbook (he must be new). “Disciplinary segregation, let’s go.”

“Hey, that’s not fair,” Kevin protests, “he started it! Gallo, Gallo started it! Back off! Hey!”

Mike thrashes in the guards’ grasp, tripping as they manhandle him into the hallway.

Fuck.

\---

The bed is kind of stupidly big for one person.

The thousand thread count sheets are exquisite, but still. There’s really only one point to a king size mattress, and there hasn’t been a whole lot of time for that recently. Not that the idea is particularly appealing at the moment; he can’t afford the distraction.

Mike probably sleeps on a tarp wrapped haphazardly around a single. Only marginally worse than that rattrap he lived in when they first met. Probably.

Harvey tosses aside the white combed cotton blanket and sits facing the windows, plants his feet on the floor. The thermostat holds steady at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit.

The prison is obligated to inform him of any serious harm that’s come to his client, so he knows Mike isn’t dead, or dying. The information (presumed) does nothing to assuage his guilt (profound), which does nothing to calm his nerves (perturbing).

He’d been thinking all day about making that call. Mike will be so excited to hear about how the newly rebranded Specter Litt landed Van Doorn, a rare crude oil tycoon looking to shift to renewable energy; Mike’s all about that kind of betterment-of-humanity crap (although realistically, Van Doorn is just another greedy bastard with uncommonly pragmatic foresight).

Plus, they haven’t spoken in nearly two weeks, and Harvey misses the sound of a friendly voice.

Misses the sound of his voice.

He must’ve had a good reason for not picking up, though. Must’ve had one.

Sighing heavily, Harvey pushes himself up out of bed and shuffles to the living room. A couple of fingers of scotch will do the trick, or maybe whiskey, if he’s feeling brazen.

Mike is fine. Definitely fine.

He’ll try again tomorrow.

\---

“Michael James Ross, this disciplinary committee finds you guilty on all accounts.”

Bang, bang.

“You are hereby sentenced to five years in disciplinary segregation.”

Bang, bang!

“What?”

Mike leaps to his feet, digging his nails into the wooden table; the log books scatter to the ground, his endless list of witnesses up in smoke as the empty khaki jumpsuits file ploddingly out the door.

Sorry, Mike, Kevin whispers. Sorry. We tried.

“You can’t do this!” Mike hollers. “You can’t do this, I’m only in here for two years!”

“Make the best of what we offer you,” says the corrections officer as he snaps cuffs around Mike’s wrists, the metal brackets digging into his skin, “and you will suffer less than you deserve.”

What? What?

“I demand a council.” Mike pounds his fists against the tabletop. “I demand to see my attorney.”

“Mister Specter has gagged on his silver spoon,” says the corrections officer as he pushes Mike out into the hall.

The grey metal door creaks as it opens, and the warden arrives to preside over the ceremony.

“Throw that junk in,” he announces. Mike feels his ankle fracture as he hits the floor, his shoulder blades knocking against the wall (the room is six by nine feet, he calculates as he hits his head on the toilet).

“Call Harvey,” he pleads again, “come on, call Harvey!”

The warden chuckles as the door begins to close.

“Don’t ever argue with the big dog,” he says, “because the big dog is always right.”

Everything is buzzing, grey and cold. Mike claws at the walls as the lights hum brokenly.

“Is anybody there?”

No, Mike. Not this time.

“Somebody please, help me! Please! Anybody!”

Weren’t you paying attention?

He wakes in a cold sweat, panting frantically, nearly hyperventilating.

Just a little while longer.

\---

Harvey sits in his Lexus in the prison parking lot with his hands clenched around the wheel, his phone trilling a quiet reminder that he really didn’t have time to come out here today.

Go to hell, how about that?

Solitary confinement, they said. Five weeks for aggravated assault.

Good, he tells himself, that’s good. For one thing, it means Mike’s not in the infirmary dying, or worse; for another, it means five weeks guaranteed to be free of Gallo’s taunts and torments, and maybe Mike can get some sleep.

Harvey’s seen Danbury’s “segregation” unit.

Slamming his hands down on the wheel, he fumbles in the glove compartment for a sheet of Paxil.

\---  
**WEEK 18**  
\---

The door clicks—the door, not the narrow slot in the middle (don’t forget to feed the dogs)—and Mike nearly jumps out of his skin.

“ _What_ the fuck—”

A corrections officer grabs for Mike’s wrist with a world-weariness that speaks volumes of how little he thinks of everything around him. Mike stumbles out into the hall (darkness, blessed darkness), the door slamming behind him as he follows blindly, trying to blink his vision into focus. Everything is slightly doubled, and some of the walls are melting.

“Hey hey, wait,” he demands, “where are you taking me?”

“The sentence was five weeks,” the officer says as they walk down a hallway that looks like every other hallway. “Back to your cell, it’s time for the count.”

“What time is it?”

The officer shoves him in and slams the door.

“Time for count.”

Kevin stands beside his bed, looking over nervously when Mike sits on his pillow.

“Get up,” he mutters. “Man, come on.”

Right.

Mike stands beside the door and stares at the fading photos taped up on Kevin’s side of the wall.

Thirty-three minutes later, Kevin dares to speak again.

“So how’re you doing?”

Mike shakes his head.

“What time is it?”

Kevin lowers his eyebrows and thins his lips, scrutinizing attention that Mike gladly mistakes for affection. 

“Five,” he says. “In the morning.”

Makes sense. Mike stands, his legs only quivering a little.

“I’m gonna take a shower.”

Kevin nods.

“Want me to come with?” he asks, and Mike realizes he’s been handling Gallo alone for over a month.

Yes, he should say. I would appreciate the company, and you probably don’t want to be left alone. Sure, he should say. If you want.

“Whatever,” he dismisses, and it feels pretty appropriate, all things considered.

They stand in separate stalls under the boiling spray, looking away from each other, and finish around the same time, rushing through the motions at the same practiced speed and throwing their clothes back on before the frigid air splits their skin.

Mike goes to bed early and tries to remember how to sleep in a war zone.

\---

“You shouldn’t be here,” Mike says, which isn’t nearly the reaction Harvey hoped for.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Harvey replies, which isn’t true in any concrete way but hopefully sounds like something good and kind.

Mike scoffs.

Harvey sits slowly.

“Mike,” he hedges. “You can’t let Gallo get to you like this. You can’t let him keep baiting you.”

“How do you know that’s what happened?” Mike asks. “Maybe I just decided to show him what he’s up against, let him know who’s boss.”

Harvey smirks and looks away. “You didn’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know _you,_ ” he says, still grinning. “I know you’re not stupid enough to pull that kind of stunt, but I know you’re exactly stupid enough to believe the right kind of lie twice in a row.”

“He said he was going after Rachel,” Mike defends with ice in his eyes, in his veins. “I couldn’t risk it not being a lie.”

“Rachel’s taking a semester at Cambridge!” Harvey snaps, turning on a dime and lurching to his feet. “How do you think he’s gonna get to her there?”

“You think he doesn’t have pull at Harvard?”

“Not Harvard, Mike, the University of Cambridge! In England!”

Mike deflates in his chair; so he legitimately didn’t know. Rachel hadn’t told him.

Harvey thinks about Mike arguing to keep Rachel from going to Stanford, thinks about how many times Rachel tried to persuade him to take the deal that would keep him out of prison and throw Harvey under the bus, thinks about how much they’ve both tried to convince each other to sacrifice to keep their relationship intact. The gap between Mike and his old life opens wider, and Harvey sits again, leaning forward over the table.

“I’m sorry,” Harvey says, even though he has nothing to be sorry for.

Mike grunts.

They linger in the silence until the guard bangs his baton against the door; other people need to use this room too, dumbass.

“You know you can get married in prison,” Mike says. “As long as the intended spouse isn’t being coerced and doesn’t present a security risk.”

Harvey nods. He does know that.

“I think Rachel and I are gonna break up,” Mike says. “Could you tell her to give me a call?”

An uncomfortable knot settles in Harvey’s chest, but he doesn’t know quite what emotion to attach to it.

“How about I give you her number.”

Mike folds his hands together, looking down at his interlaced fingers.

“Yeah. That might be better.”

\---  
**WEEK 27**  
\---

Harvey hasn’t visited in weeks. Four weeks and one day (nearly a month).

Mikes tried calling a few days ago and almost got his phone confiscated. It’s not that the near miss made him skittish, it’s just that…

Well. Maybe sort of.

“Mailbag,” Kevin announces, dropping a white envelope with a water stain along the edge into Mike’s lap. It’s got Harvey’s name and Specter Litt’s address in the upper left corner, neat script he doesn’t recognize but that could feasibly be Donna’s. Maybe there’s some explanation for his absence; everyone knows the guards deliver communication approximately whenever they feel like it, sometimes even months after the post date. But Harvey hasn’t given up on him, that’s the important thing; the guards might be colossal douchebags, but Harvey cares, and that’s all that really matters.

Mike slides his finger under the seal and bites down on a giddy smile. Something big must be happening at the firm; Harvey must be doing well. Mike hopes he’s happy.

**GOT YOU.**

He reads it again, then once more.

What the fuck?

He brandishes the paper at Kevin. “Where did you get this?”

Kevin looks up from his own multi-page letter and what looks like a new photo of his kids. “Same place I got mine, why? Is Harvey okay, is everything okay?”

“Does this look okay to you?”

Kevin responds instantly, acting about as aghast as Mike feels.

“I I I’m so sorry Mike, I—I have no idea where that came from.”

Mike balls up the paper and shoves it into his pocket. It’s no mystery, of course.

“Don’t worry about it,” he says, stomping to the door. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Kevin nods and watches him go.

Gallo sits alone at a table in the crowded day room, facing the direction of Mike’s cell with a shit-eating grin on his face that makes it clear he’s been expecting him. Mike resists the urge to grab his collar and throw him to the ground.

“Get any interesting mail recently?” Gallo asks.

Mike stands tall and takes a moment to gather himself.

“Why did you do it?”

“How did it make you feel when you saw his name?” Gallo retorts tauntingly. Mike glowers.

“Why. Did. You. Do it.”

He’s much shorter than Mike, but Gallo stands and invades Mike’s space like he belongs there, confident he hasn’t put himself in harm’s way.

“I wanted to give you some hope,” he says with the bare control that only comes of deeply-set rage. “That I could _step on._ ” He pushes Mike’s shoulder, just a tap, and Mike leans away from it. “I wanted to make you understand that I don’t just have your safety in my control, I have your belief hanging from my _fingertips._ Everything you want, everything you think you have, it’s all mine to rip out from under you.” He pushes him again, a little harder. “Your slutty little girlfriend wouldn’t even stick around for you, and you thought Harvey would? You thought Harvey Specter would wait for you? You’re nothing. You’re garbage.” Pushes him again, harder still. “Got it?”

Mike seethes, biting his tongue. Don’t let him keep baiting you, he tells himself. Don’t do it. Be the bigger man. Be the man Harvey wants you to be. Be the man who deserves to have Harvey stand by him, stand up for him.

A much larger inmate takes hold of the back of Mike’s neck as he storms away, throwing him off course and maybe giving him a pinched nerve. Mike stumbles and keeps on walking.

When he gets back to the cell, Kevin holds out his phone.

“You got a call,” he offers. Mike takes it and looks nervously over his shoulder, but Kevin waves his hand as though to brush his concerns aside.

“I got you.”

Smiling gratefully, Mike goes to the corner and closes his eyes as he raises the phone to his ear.

“Harvey.”

\---  
**WEEK 35**  
\---

The yard is cold in tone if not in temperature, a desaturated filter laid over the scene and making everything look decrepit and fragile. Mike would pick up one of the weights stacked along the wall if he didn’t think it would turn to dust in his hand.

On the ground lies an inmate dead of heat exhaustion; behind his body stands another attempting to drown himself with little success in a shallow dish of orange juice. Growling his frustration, he flings the dish aside and grabs a gun from the holster of a passing guard, shooting himself between the eyes; the guard wanders on indifferently, whistling a jovial tune.

Outside the gates sprawls an endless field of a gentle spring day, grass quivering in the breeze and dandelion seeds drifting into the clouds. Mike watches forlornly until the sirens begin to wail and the grass slowly melts, slithering away and leaving him stranded in the middle of the tundra.

“Hello,” he calls halfheartedly. “Is anybody there?”

A shrill wind whistles in his ears and the crisp air glows faintly blue, but all he feels is sticky summer heat against his skin as he sweats through his heavy shirt.

“Anybody?” he calls again, and his voice is lost in the gale but it doesn’t matter because he knows the answer anyway.

“Harvey?”

Now why would you ask a thing like that?

Mike wakes in stages, the darkness all-encompassing and disorienting before he remembers that it doesn’t matter. Night is night, after all; the specific time is irrelevant until morning count.

Feeling around under his mattress, Mike searches out the phone he knows (but doesn’t always believe) is hidden there. It is, isn’t it, it wasn’t confiscated during the night, Kevin wouldn’t take it from him, it’s there somewhere, it—

Mike’s fingers close around the plastic casing and he sighs.

It might be morning soon.

Carry on, carry on.

\---  
**WEEK 43**  
\---

A scrap of paper falls from the jamb when Mike opens the door to his cell sometime after lunch but before evening count. (He’s long since lost any true perception of time.)

_I’m going to bash your head in with a 20lb barbell. XOXO Frank_

Gritting his teeth, he shoves it into the ripped seam of his mattress with the others and thinks (as he does every day) that he really ought to throw them all away.

(Why don’t you?)

Maybe he’ll stay away from the yard for awhile.

\---  
**WEEK 77**  
\---

Five hundred and forty-one days. One hundred and eighty-nine days off for a combination of good behavior and prison overcrowding; it would’ve been more, maybe, but. Inmates with notes like “assaulting any person” and “thirty-five days disciplinary segregation” in their files aren’t granted many favors.

Mike feels the judgmental gazes of the intake officers on his back as he changes into his old suit (too big in some places and too small in others) and collects his old cell phone (zero battery and massively outdated) and hopes he can find a sympathetic bus driver who will give him a ride despite his lack of fare (a tip he picked up from a career criminal named Five who measures his life’s accomplishments in the lengths of his sentences).

When he walks out the door, Harvey is there.

It’s been months since he came to visit. One hundred and thirty-four days.

Mike sticks his hand in his pocket and clutches the letters shoved in there. Real ones, two of them. He remembers how impressed he had been that Harvey found the time; a phone call would’ve been easier, faster, and probably conveyed more information.

(“I’m sorry I haven’t visited in awhile,” says the first one. “Rebuilding the firm hit a little snag, remind me to tell you about it later. Sometimes I just want to pull up the stakes and start over somewhere else, do you know the feeling?”)

It was nice, though, to have those pieces of paper stuck up on his wall to look at whenever he wanted. To reread in person rather than in his head. To pull him back from that cliff he spent too much time dancing on the edge of.

(“I hope these are getting to you,” says the second. “I know how unreliable the postal service is in the federal prison system. I bet if you were on your bike, you could have them delivered in a single day; Google Maps says it’s about a seven hour ride, but I know you could do it in six.”)

Harvey smirks like he can’t help it.

“What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he asks. Mike looks down and grins.

“Pretty sure I could ask you the same,” he says, walking forward. Harvey steps away from his car—Aston Martin, Mike recognizes the brand logo but not the model—and sticks out his hand.

Mike waits for another irreverent quip, but none comes; he takes Harvey’s hand and shakes it firmly.

“It’s good to see you, Mike.”

They smile at each other as though they’ve just closed a business deal. Harvey jerks his head toward the car.

“Come on. Where do you wanna go?”

Mike looks up at the cloudy sky, breathes deep the hints of an impending thunderstorm, stinging his sinuses; it’s nice to breathe and finally get enough air.

This is what freedom feels like.

“I want to drive along the I-684 at a hundred and fifty miles an hour with the windows open all the way,” he says. “I want to go for a run in the rain down a ninety-mile road and not stop until I feel like I’m going to die.”

Harvey nods and looks out along the horizon.

“Let’s get started.”

\---

They outrun the thunderstorm for awhile, about a quarter of the distance back to the city, and when it catches them, Mike doesn’t object to rolling the windows back up. The car is quiet, and even though he’s not averse to the silence per se, Harvey feels an impulse to turn the radio on; he can’t think of anything specific he wants to listen to, though, so he doesn’t.

When they stop at a gritty little Shell station, Mike waits for Harvey’s invitation before he gets out of the car and stands under the downpour for nearly five minutes until Harvey tells him to get back in before he catches hypothermia.

“I don’t have anywhere to go,” Mike confides, tousling his wet hair and shedding his jacket to the footwell as they rejoin the highway. “Rachel took the apartment.”

That doesn’t seem exactly fair, considering that Mike originally bought the place for his grandmother, but then again, Rachel’s been paying bills and maintenance since Mike’s incarceration; Harvey isn’t sure she took it so much as Mike probably gave it to her. It’s not a subject on which it’s particularly worthwhile to dwell.

“Stay with me,” Harvey says, keeping his eyes on the road.

Mike coughs a hitching laugh.

“That’s not where I was going with that.”

“Yeah you were,” Harvey assures him. “You just didn’t know it yet.”

Mike rests his elbow on the windowsill and his chin in his hand, trying hard to hide his rain-drenched tremors as he watches the storm tumble down at a steep angle.

They’re on the road another nine minutes before he falls asleep; Harvey turns up the heat and drives a few miles per hour under the speed limit.

Mike looks like he could use the rest.

\---

They don’t make it back to the city until almost seven; Harvey drops the Aston Martin (DB11, Harvey clarifies) at the car club and Ray is there to drive them back to Harvey’s place, which Mike finds an uncomfortable indulgence even as he knows how absurdly _normal_ it is for them.

Stepping out of the private elevator, Harvey urges Mike to relax in the living room, offering anything he wants to watch on television (or whatever).

“You hungry?” Harvey asks as he goes to the closet to hang up his coat. Mike bypasses the television for the kitchen sink, filling a tall glass with tap water and downing it like a dying man rescued from the desert.

“Hungry, yeah,” he says when he’s finished the glass off twice. “Uh. Not really sure what for.”

Harvey looks at Mike critically as he picks up the phone, nodding after a moment.

“Don’t worry about it.”

Mike braces himself for something rich and extravagant.

He flinches violently when the buzzer rings fifteen minutes later, but then Harvey surprises him with stuffed crust mushroom and pepperoni pizza that he eats too fast and starts to turn his stomach at the end but is still the best thing he’s ever tasted, hands down. When Harvey offers a glass of scotch from the locked cabinet under the media center, he takes it reservedly and doesn’t drink until Harvey does (but god, it’s so good).

After dinner, Harvey directs him to the main bathroom and for some reason tells him he can lock the door if he wants, but either way, Harvey won’t bother him. Mike doesn’t lock it while he showers for ages, using soap and then body wash and shampooing his hair twice, but he does flip the tumbler before he towels himself dry and brushes his teeth with a squeeze of toothpaste on his finger, and it’s not as though he’s in any danger, but it makes him feel more secure all the same.

Harvey offers grey sweatpants and a black t-shirt, because anything with the Harvard logo on it would just be too ironic, and they watch the second half of an old _Leverage_ before Mike starts smothering yawns and thinking about what would be the best sleeping position on this very comfortable couch.

“Guest room’s this way,” Harvey says, turning off the television and standing up. Mike follows him down the hall (warmly lit, definitely not melting) and tries not to be consumed by his gratitude.

“Goodnight, Mike,” Harvey says.

“’Night, Harvey.” Mike sits on the bed and bounces on the plush comforter. “Thank you. For everything.”

Harvey smiles, nods once, and closes the door.

\---

Mike wakes early and assures himself first thing that he’s really out, that it wasn’t a dream. He stares up at the ceiling, at its lights that don’t buzz and its smooth matte finish and its soft yellow hue in the early morning light shining through the massive windows over his head.

Windows, this room has _windows._

Harvey knocks on the door gently, in case Mike isn’t awake yet; Mike tenses at the sound before he reminds himself that Harvey would never (ever) hurt him (on purpose), and if he lets go of his paranoia for awhile, it won’t kill him (anymore).

“Hey,” he calls as he sits up, pushing far more pillows than necessary up behind his back and sinking into them.

Harvey takes the invitation to come in; he’s already showered and dressed, naturally. He’s wearing a waistcoat, Mike notices, wondering if that’s become a regular thing. As a managing partner, he requires a certain level of panache.

“Morning,” Harvey says, standing at the foot of the bed. Mike smiles and scratches the base of his neck.

A few seconds later, Harvey clears his throat and shifts his weight to the left.

“I was thinking,” he begins with an unfamiliar trepidation that keeps Mike from interjecting the requisite “I’ll alert the media.”

“Do you remember,” Harvey asks, “what I said to you about a week after you went in?”

Mike frowns, feeling uncomfortably like a middle schooler sent to the principal’s office. “You said a lot of things.”

“I said we could really use you,” Harvey continues his prepared speech, ignoring Mike’s interjection. “I said it’d be great to have you back.”

It wasn’t a joke, then. Mike never quite stopped wondering.

“Harvey,” he says, looking away and wishing to crawl under the covers for awhile, or into a hole in Earth’s crust. “I… You know I can’t.”

“You could be a consultant,” Harvey challenges. He’s given this a lot of thought, apparently. “Look, Mike, I know you want to get back to work. And—if not at the firm, then…somewhere.”

Mike bristles at the assertion, but there’s no denying that it’s true. Besides, he needs a job to keep out of trouble with the parole board. Even when he thought about it in the last days of his incarceration, though, about going back to the firm, an old sense of “not good enough” crept over him, and it’s only been honed since by a newer reminder than he’s become irrevocably damaged goods and doesn’t particularly deserve the life Harvey is offering to drop in his lap.

“I can see how it might be—awkward,” Harvey says, “but I know how proud you were to be a lawyer, Mike, and if you wanted to try it, if you just wanted to give it a shot— And if you hate it, it’s…”

Mike wonders if that’s even possible, but it’s a kindness for Harvey to give him the out before he carries on as though he hadn’t made the offer in the first place.

“I’m not gonna force you into anything,” he settles on. “And if it’s going back to the office that’s holding you back, you know consultants can work remotely, some of the time, you wouldn’t need to be there every day. And Louis knows you, he wouldn’t need to meet with you to approve your position, or, hell, I could just go over his head.”

He wants to believe it, really he does. Harvey seems so damn convinced, and Harvey is so smart and so clever.

But Mike is the one who committed the crime. Mike is the one who was caught.

Bending his knees to his chest and laying his arms over them, he looks up at Harvey; he’s not as angry as Mike expected, not as focused. This isn’t Harvey the Closer making this offer, this is Harvey the…what? Former boss who needs a hand?

No. This is Harvey, Mike’s friend, trying to do what’s right. A little bit pushy, a little bit repentant.

Maybe a lot repentant; it’s hard to parse it out the exact ratio.

Mike nods, linking his hands together.

“Thank you, Harvey,” he says. “I’ll think about it.”

Harvey sighs loudly through his nose, pursing his lips. Come on, Harvey, you had to see this coming.

“I miss working with you.”

Mike smiles.

“Yeah.”

\---

Mike does think about it.

The day is consumed by his thinking about it.

Mustering the nerve to rifle through Harvey’s kitchen cabinets for something that could pass for breakfast, he thinks about muddy coffee in the breakroom.

Making his bed with the sheets pulled tight enough to bounce a quarter off of and hospital corners to keep them pinned, he thinks about pretending to know how to file a subpoena.

Reading the newspaper and making mildly educated guesses to fill in the pop culture and international news details he would know if he’d been a free man the past year and a half, he thinks about working through the night to find the single careless detail tucked away at the bottom of page five hundred and twenty-two of the mutually agreed-upon contract which holds the power, for anyone willing to exploit it, to shatter an entire merger.

Turning on the television and nursing an IPA in an effort to drown out his bullet train brain, he thinks about confronting prosecutors with their own oversights and watching the panic quietly settle in as they realize they’ve jumped into the deep end with the sharks and left their life preserver on the shore.

Going out for a languid walk down to the Battery, he thinks about viable alternatives, sensible branches he could follow away from the rotten core that landed him in prison.

Sitting on Harvey’s balcony as the sky darkens, he rubs his wrists and thinks about the consequences of the life he’s led, the things he’s done that sent him spiraling off in this direction.

Closing his eyes, he watches himself being marched out of that office, watches for the same hollowness in his eyes that he feels now in his chest. Watches all of his friends, his _family_ as they stare at him in shock, wishing he had answers, any answers at all, to their endless parade of questions. Watches their horror, confusion, disgust, despair as the early phase of their communal destruction speeds straight to the climax, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

Mike stands and folds his arms in front of himself, looking out over the river and the skyline, the threads of clouds above, and thinks about how he feels it in his heart and soul that something needs to change, that he misses a lot of things about his old life but he can’t go back to the way things were and expect it to turn out any different.

The front door opens and Harvey returns from the battlefield, weary and worn.

Shedding his armor, dropping his weapons, he joins Mike on the balcony and leans against the railing.

“Good day?” Mike asks. Harvey tsks out of the corner of his mouth.

“I won’t lose any sleep over it.”

Standing shoulder to shoulder, mirror images, they keep their gazes locked on the city sprawled before them.

The silence is cut by a revving motorcycle, a speeding taxi.

Mike sighs.

“I’ve thought about it,” he says, forcing the words past his lips. Harvey still doesn’t look at him, sensing the dot, dot, dot at the end of his sentence and waiting for the rest.

“And, I,” Mike fumbles. “I… I’m still thinking.”

Harvey nods and leans over the railing.

It’s a long way down.

\---

The next morning, sitting on the edge of the bed in a clean pair of track pants (cinched at the waist) and a plain white t-shirt (somewhat baggy), Mike holds his breath and closes his eyes and calls Rachel.

She picks up after the first ring.

“Rachel Zane.”

He says her name on a sigh.

“Rachel.”

The silence stretches; he purses his lips.

“Mike,” she says. “It’s good to hear from you.”

“Yep.”

The silence stretches; he picks at his cuticles.

“How have you been?”

Please don’t ask me that.

“Fine.”

“So…what’s up?” she asks, and he envisions her shrugging forward over her desk, a wavy sort of motion. Yeah, probably.

“How’s work?”

He imagines her furrowing her brow, maybe growing suspicious, maybe irate. “Work is good,” she says. “Mike, why are you calling me?”

He smiles, though at what, he doesn’t know.

“I was thinking I should probably come and get my stuff out of your place,” he says, trying to sound cheerful, or at least not morose. “My clothes, mostly, I mean I know it’s all…yours.”

Not really, but that’s not important.

“Where are you staying?” she asks sharply. “Mike, are you back in Manhattan? Are you in Brooklyn?”

He scratches his nose and feels the sun on his back.

“I’m staying at Harvey’s.”

Her breath catches, the start and stop of an accusation.

“Oh.”

The silence stretches; he scrapes his nails along the duvet cover.

“Come over this evening,” she says. “I’ll be home by seven.”

He sighs, trying to think of something to say.

“Hey, Rachel,” he comes up with. “Thank you.”

She hums, but he can’t tell anymore if she’s smiling or not.

“You’re welcome.”

A few seconds later, she hangs up.

Makes sense.

\---

From the moment he enters the building, Mike regrets coming over. The doorman waves him up with a plastic smile that Mike answers with a flippant salute and the fake-vintage elevator moves as slowly as he remembers; he pauses outside the apartment door for a moment (one of the neighbors is burning something spicy) before forcing himself to ring the bell.

Rachel answers as though she’d been waiting on the other side.

“Hey Mike,” she says gently. He nods, and she steps aside.

“How are things?” he asks, which is a vague enough question to be impersonal but all-encompassing enough to seem legitimately interested. She grins, biting her lower lip.

“Really busy,” she replies. “It’s kind of insane, the amount of stuff I’m doing, I feel like I haven’t slept in months.” She guides him toward the living room. “It’s great, though, I’m learning so much.”

He stands beside the couch, kicking his heels along the carpet.

“That’s great.”

“Yeah.”

She puts her hand on the wall and casts her eyes to the floor, and he looks around at all the little changes she’s made. There are textbooks stacked on nearly every surface, carefully organized and brimming with color-coded Post-It tabs. A ceramic sculpture he doesn’t recognize sits on a shelf beside a decorative bookend.

He remembers what this place looked like when he bought it.

“Do you want a drink?” she asks in a high-pitched tone, leaning toward the kitchen. He shakes his head and hopes his flimsy imitation of a smile doesn’t look too much like a grimace.

“No thanks.”

She nods, her gaze rising to the ceiling.

“So,” she says after a bit, straightening up and taking brisk steps to the closet. “This is all your stuff here; I don’t know if you want to call a car? I mean there’s not a ton, but…you know.”

He doesn’t know. It’s okay.

There are two boxes sealed with packing tape and one large rectangle wrapped in butcher paper and string. (It’s the panda, he knows it is; she probably enjoyed stashing it away.) “MIKE” is written along the sides of all three, and the label on the picture is underlined with a hectic scribble.

“I think I’ll just get a cab,” he says, bending to life the first box. It’s not too heavy.

She follows him to the elevator, carrying the picture.

“Okay,” she says as the doors open. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

What a strange offer.

He nods and smiles at her efforts.

“Thanks. Good luck with everything.”

She nods and smiles at his in return.

When he hauls his meager belongings out to the curb, Ray is holding open the door of the Lexus’s backseat, and Mike doesn’t know why he’s so surprised.

So that’s the end of that.

\---

Three days later, Mike gets a call from the parole board. He tries not to sound like a smartass when he assures the clerk that he’ll be there tomorrow morning, definitely; he doesn’t think he has much success.

The corrections agency is on 100 Center Street. He rides his bike—well, _a_ bike, he’s not entirely sure where Harvey got it or what he intends it for, but it’s a really nice one and Harvey doesn’t object when he mounts up—from the apartment (Harvey’s apartment), paying careful attention to every stop, yield, and one way sign, staying in the bike lanes and stopping at red lights.

At the agency, a uniformed officer stands inside the front doors with his hands behind his back and his hips angled to show off his gun, and Mike’s stomach turns at the sight of him. Dodging eye contact as he shuffles past, he reminds himself that this guy doesn’t give a shit about him, which helps in some ways and hurts in others, so it all basically evens out. (Is he on Gallo’s payroll, though? No, no way, that’s too much of a coincidence. Don’t worry about it.)

The building is concrete and drywall with cheap blue carpeting and dirt in the corners and it smells like chalk and Lysol and it gives him the creeps. He waits outside his parole officer’s door for seventy-two minutes (he counts without meaning to) before she’s available (their appointment was set to begin eighteen minutes ago).

The parole officer is in her forties, he estimates, one of those women from the beginning of a romantic comedy who’s going to get a makeover at some point and reveal herself to be a striking beauty but for now is overworked and underappreciated and just ties her straight black hair back in a ponytail to be done with it.

“Michael Ross,” she says to her day planner as he stands awkwardly before her. “My name is Lisa Von, I’ve been assigned to your case. Please sit.”

He does. She looks at him expectantly.

“Have you had any police contact since your release?” she asks as though he should have answered without her needing to bother.

“You mean like have I been arrested again?” he asks in a fluster. She pinches the bridge of her nose between her index finger and thumb and he shakes his head. “Uh, no contact. Just—just the guy in the lobby downstairs.”

“What was the nature of your altercation with Officer Cassidy,” she says as though the very fact of Mike’s presence is an inconvenience. He shakes his head again.

“No—no altercation,” he says. “He’s just the only police officer I’ve been around since I got out. I just walked past him, there was no…altercation.”

(Close call, close call. Was it? No, he’s just a man. Is he? Yes, Mike, shut up already.)

She makes a noise that sounds like acknowledgment and directs her attention to her computer screen.

“Have you found gainful full-time employment?”

He winces at the reminder, Harvey’s offer loudly crossing his mind.

“No ma’am.”

“Are you seeking such employment?”

Soul-searching and self-pity count, right? Yeah, of course. Absolutely, you bet.

“Yes ma’am.”

She nods dismissively. “And you still reside at…three-three-zero east thirty-eighth street?”

He bites down on his tongue. Shit, shit, shit; can’t gloss your way over this one.

“I uh, I reside at, um, twenty-five Cooper Square,” he says in what he hopes is a casual, or even dismissive tone; this is no big deal, everything is fine.

Not a chance.

She levels him with a spiteful glare that makes him flinch back in his seat. “Look, Ross,” she says, “aside from yours, I’ve been assigned ten new parolees this week, one of my repeat offenders is about to get himself arrested, again, and my boss doesn’t get back from vacation for another nine days, so you can either count yourself very unlucky that you’re not making the best first impression or you can count yourself super special extra lucky that even though this should have been the first piece of information handed to me upon your arrival,” she arches her eyebrows cynically and Mike hears the undertone of _how did you not know that,_ “you’re new and you clearly don’t know what the fuck you’re doing so I’m not going to bother following up on that particular violation of your terms of residency.” She taps her computer screen ominously and he feels very lucky (indeed).

“The infraction is going in your record,” she warns him, “but given what I understand to be the price point on your new…dwelling, I assume that you’re living with some kind of, let’s call it a benefactor?”

Mike nods and she rolls her eyes.

“Alright, just…stay on her good side.”

“His,” Mike corrects reflexively, regretting it immediately as her gaze narrows.

“I don’t _care,_ ” she snaps. “I’ll be making a home visit at some point and if you’ve moved again without notifying me…” she trails off ominously. “Don’t move again without notifying me.”

“I won’t,” he promises.

Rather than respond, she looks pointedly at the door behind him; he leaps to his feet as she scrawls some notes across a legal pad (ha, the irony) and shoves them into a file folder with his name printed on the tab.

“Get a job,” she remarks. He shifts in place until she looks up at him again.

“Did you need something else?”

“Uh.” Looking over his shoulder, he holds his bike helmet to his chest. “No, I—I’ll…wait for your home visit.” He turns back to her, looking past her desk to the far corner of the room. “Is this like a Time Warner Cable thing, you’ll be there between the hours of nine and one, or like…”

“Don’t be cute.” She pins him with her scrutinizing gaze and he experiences a series of rapid flashbacks to every time he’s ever been called into Jessica’s office. Then, with a small smirk either for him or at his expense, she returns her attention to her computer.

“And don’t leave the state.”

Turning on his heel, he makes his escape.

\---

Mike finds himself waylaid on the way back to Harvey’s, taking a left instead of a right (not on purpose but kind of) and keeps going, going, nowhere in particular. Then he remembers that the High Line is an elevated open space and rides all the way to Gansevoort Street, chaining the bike to a “No Standing” sign and jogging up the stairs to the park proper.

He sits on a wooden bench shaped like a chaise lounge, inhaling the grass, the trees, the city, the sky. The other people. (Ignore at your own peril.)

(Don’t be paranoid.)

This is what freedom sounds like.

Not so much losing track of time as forgetting to think about it in the first place, Mike eventually rides back to Harvey’s and chains the bike (his bike?) to the bike rack (this building has its own _bike rack_ ), greeting the doorman on his way to the elevator bank.

“Mister Ross; Mister Specter has authorized your use of his private elevator,” the doorman says as he passes, and it makes him pause midstride, catching himself on the wall.

“Thank you,” Mike says, smiling. “Maybe, maybe next time.”

The doorman nods politely and Mike rides up to the top floor. Trying to turn his key in the lock, he finds it already open, feeling a flash of panic before he remembers that he shouldn’t be surprised.

“Harvey?” he calls out, closing the door behind himself and pacing tentatively to the kitchen for a glass of water.

“Hey,” Harvey calls back from the living room; another sound cuts out, noticeable in its absence. He must’ve been watching the news or something.

Mike joins him, sitting in an armchair beside the couch as Harvey smiles; whatever case has been hounding him this week must have been resolved today.

“How’d it go?”

Mike shrugs, takes a sip. “Fine. She seems—nice. Stressed but nice.”

“That’s good.”

“She told me to get a job.”

Harvey tucks his lips between his teeth. “Hm.”

“Yeah.”

They sit in an awkward silence that puts a weight on Mike’s shoulders, presses hard on Harvey’s chest; things haven’t been like this between them for a long time, not even in Danbury. Maybe not since the Sidwell thing. There’s a wall there, something Mike can’t quite identify and Harvey thinks he can make out but doesn’t know how to knock down.

A small clicking sound makes Mike startle, and then Harvey claps his hands down on his thighs.

“Dinner?” he proposes. “Thai alright?”

Mike makes an indifferent noise, moving his head in a way that could be interpreted as nodding, and Harvey considers asking what’s wrong.

Don’t bother. He’ll come clean when he’s ready.

“Chicken satay?” he asks as he picks up the phone, which yanks Mike out of his stupor for the moment, at least.

“I’m not hungry,” he says, standing and walking to the windows. It’s his favorite spot.

Harvey pauses, having already dialed the first five numbers, and hangs up. It’ll be fine; he’s not very hungry, either.

He stands beside Mike at the windows and tries to see what he sees.

Dark corners, bright lights. The crooked horizon stretching out for miles in either direction.

This is what freedom looks like.

“My parole officer thought I still lived with Rachel.” Mike keeps his eyes on the view as he speaks, and Harvey waits.

He waits for quite some time.

Mike sighs sharply.

“Why didn’t you tell her?”

Harvey frowns; for one thing, it hadn’t occurred to him that the parole board would assume that Mike was living at the same address he had been before his arrest, and for another, why would it be his responsibility? Mike is a grown man, Mike knows how to use the phone.

“I didn’t think of it,” he says, safer than the preferable “Why should I have?”

Mike’s teeth click together and he turns from the window, walking to the coffee table; Harvey turns too but doesn’t follow.

“I got lucky,” Mike says. “She said I was lucky, she said I was, and I quote, ‘super special extra lucky’ that she’s too busy with other shit to bother submitting a violation for me.”

Harvey puts his hands in his pockets.

“That’s good,” he tries. “Nice break.”

“Nice _break?_ ” Mike snaps, whirling around. “Harvey, it was a stupid mistake! A simple, stupid mistake based on some outdated fucking information, and you should have known and you should have—you should have warned me, I shouldn’t have had to go in there and look like an idiot!”

Of all the things that Harvey expected to possibly come out of Mike’s mouth tonight, this one is near the bottom of the list, if it’s on there at all.

“I should have known?” he echoes. “I should have known. Mike.” This is one of those moments for grounding, for touching, but Mike doesn’t move so Harvey doesn’t, either. “Are you hearing yourself?”

“Well you’ve done everything else!”

Un-fucking-believable.

“You’d rather I’d’ve left you at Danbury?” Harvey bites back. “Left you to hitchhike back to New York, to become a delivery boy for Pizza Hut and live in a six-story walkup with a bunch of rats and roaches as you let the last seven years of your life go to waste, is that what you wanted? Is that what I should have done?”

“I’d rather you stop treating me like a little kid who can’t fix his own goddamn mistakes!”

Harvey feels his entire brain stutter and stall at the blatant irrationality of Mike’s tirade, his breath catching and some of his muscles tensing reflexively as others go limp and throw his posture all out of alignment.

Something is very wrong here.

Regaining control of his physical being, if not entirely of his mental, Harvey stands tall and looks Mike square in the eye.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Mike stares back as though he can’t understand how Harvey can possibly be this dense.

“Harvey, I was the one who committed fraud.” He presses his index finger into his chest, right against the sternum, enough pressure to ache, to burn. “For five years, I was—I was being selfish, I was breaking the law, putting you and everyone else at the firm in danger, every single day. And the first thing you tried to do,” his voice begins to rise in fervor, in pitch and tone, “was call in every favor you’ve ever earned to get me out early, to make sure I didn’t have to pay for what I’d done. To make sure I got special treatment, to try to put me above the law that you and I have spent so much time defending!”

“Mike, it didn’t even work!” Harvey retorts, and even as the words come out of his mouth, he doesn’t know why that’s the thing he feels the need to remind them both.

“Of course it didn’t work!”

“You were going to be found innocent!”

“I _know!_ ”

There’s nowhere new to go from there, nothing to say that hasn’t already been said and said and said, but more than anything it’s the sound of shattering glass that sucks the fight out of them, the period at the end of a long time spent not knowing what, or when. Mike stands frozen with his arm outstretched, breathing in uneven heaves, staring blindly at the pillar where the water glass hit, at the shards on the floor. Harvey’s fists are raised to protect his neck, his face, a preemptive defense, but Mike won’t come after him. That’s not really what this is about.

Mike falls to his knees, hitting the hardwood with a solid thud as the fight goes out of him, his fury simmering and cooling off. Hoping Mike doesn’t summon the last of his energy to take a swing at him, Harvey lowers his arms to his sides, baring himself completely, before he reaches out to offer his hand.

After a minute or so, Mike blinks his wet eyes and looks at it in bewilderment, so Harvey bends over to grip his wrist firmly and pull him to his feet.

Other than that godawful handshake, it’s the first time they’ve really touched since Mike got out of Danbury.

It doesn’t feel quite right. Harvey lets go.

Mikes just stares.

The temperature holds steady at seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit; it feels an awful lot warmer than that.

“Look, Mike,” Harvey says clumsily. “I… I’ve never been in this situation before, okay, I was only trying to help. I still am trying to help. And maybe it was selfish of me, when I asked you to come back. To the firm,” he amends. “You don’t have any obligation to take a job you don’t want just because I suggested it. This should be your decision. And—if you’re worried about your parole officer, tell her—tell her your old boss is an unreasonable asshole who wouldn’t hire you back. You did everything you could. You were great.”

He hopes for a laugh out of that, maybe a smile, but Mike just stares.

It’s unnerving to be on the end of it, but Harvey remembers. Harvey remembers Mike’s grandmother, and he remembers their fight before Mike went to Danbury, and he remembers telling Mike about Rachel. This is how Mike protects himself. The breakdown will come; Harvey just has to decide whether to turn the key.

No time like the present.

Harvey takes a single step forward, placing himself in Mike’s personal space, and sharpens his focus.

“Mike,” he says. “I’m not gonna tell you anything you don’t already know, but I want you to listen up, ‘cause it’s about time you heard it from someone else.”

Mike nods slowly. He doesn’t blink.

“We all wanna stand out,” Harvey says. “We all want to be _different,_ we wanna be unlike anybody else in a way that other people will respect. That’s just who we are.”

(Lawyers, Mike fills in. People like us, people who do what we do. What you did.)

“But…” Harvey smiles wanly. “Life, life is made up of repeating the same tasks and rituals over and over again, and the unusual part is the time we spend doing other things.”

Life is down here; I like it up here.

Mike’s lips part. He doesn’t blink.

“I want you to think about all the times your life has taken a one-eighty,” Harvey says. “And I know that some of it sucks, and you’ve lost some things that you’re never getting back, and I know those parts are the first ones you’re gonna think about.”

Mike clenches his teeth. It’s not as though the list is short.

“But then I want you to remember all the parts that didn’t suck,” Harvey goes on. “I want you to remember all the good you’ve done because of the opportunities you earned by working hard, by fighting through the shit you did, and I want you to remember the lives you’ve made better just by being part of them, and I want you to remember all the people who couldn’t tear you down and the obstacles you’ve overcome.”

Mike presses his lips together in a straight line. He doesn’t blink.

“And then I want you to forget all of that,” he says, and Mike startles at his bluntness.

“You want me to _what?_ ”

Harvey scowls, as much at himself as at the interruption. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Oh, you didn’t?” Mikes asks shakily. “You didn’t mean it like that, well then how did you mean it, Harvey, how did you mean it when you said I should forget everything I’ve accomplished, everything I’ve survived, every mistake that’s made me who I am?”

He isn’t even angry anymore. This, whatever it is, this is worse.

Harvey reminds himself to breathe.

“I meant,” he counters, “that you, and I, and everyone who’s in this, we need to be able to take it for what it is and, and accept what happened and learn to move on, because what’s important now is what comes next.”

Mike scoffs. “That’s rich, coming from you,” he mutters.

“How dare you,” Harvey growls before he can reel himself back. This was going so well, wasn’t it?

Wasn’t it?

Harvey grits his teeth and sighs.

“Look, Mike,” he says, leaning away. “Listen to me or don’t, okay, but just remember that I want to help you, I am _trying_ to help you, and if you want to keep getting hung up on the past, hey, that’s your business. You want to live in the middle of the war zone instead of taking the spoils you’ve earned, you go ahead, but I’ll tell you this: Five hundred and forty-one days is more than enough time to pull up a fresh start.”

Mike closes his eyes.

“You counted,” he murmurs.

Harvey nods to spur himself on.

“What’d you expect?”

Mike coughs, a watery sound both tearstained and thick, and the edges of his eyes redden a little.

Good. It’s about time.

“I went to prison for you,” he says.

Harvey laughs tartly.

“So now we’re even, is that what you’re saying?”

Mike tries to nod and succeeds only partly.

“You care about me.”

Harvey smirks. “Shut your damn mouth.”

Mike opens his eyes at last, blinking quickly, and Harvey realizes he was talking to himself.

“Look, this isn’t going to be the last time you flip your shit,” Harvey hurries on. “This isn’t going to be the last frustrating prison thing that you have to deal with, or the last one that takes you by surprise because nobody bothered to fill you in.”

Mike’s face begins to fall at the reminder, and Harvey reaches haltingly for his arm, gripping it at the last second.

“But you’re not going through your life alone, okay? Whether you come back to the firm or not, you’ve got Louis ready to go to bat for you, and Donna and Gretchen, and Benjamin, and…I’m sure Rachel will come around.” Pulling his head back slightly, tucking his chin to look Mike in the eye, Harvey raises his eyebrows and grins. “Jessica’s just a phone call away, and you know she’s dying to grill you on all the backroom crap we’ve got going on now that she’s left us to fend for ourselves.”

Mike’s smile is an obvious put-on, a show of appreciation more than anything.

“You know how much business Specter Litt would lose out on when the clients heard my name and jumped ship?” he asks rhetorically.

Mike must have traded his Harvey-to-English dictionary for an extra serving at breakfast or something. Harvey sighs through his teeth and wonders if he’ll ever forgive Mike forcing him to spell the situation out like this.

“Fuck ‘em.”

Mike narrows his eyes disbelievingly; Harvey doesn’t think it should be so surprising.

“We’ve built up a solid client base,” he says as though being on-call twenty-four hours a day for the better part of a year has been no big deal, “we don’t have to take on anyone new who we’re not interested in working with, and if they wanted to save us the trouble and run for the hills because the best damn consultant on the payroll had a little scratch on his permanent record, that’s fine with me. Saves us the trouble. And that’s if they even bother asking, you know we’re not obligated to tell them.”

Harvey sees Mike’s reflex to challenge the “best damn consultant” designation, or maybe the definition of “a little scratch,” but he knows better than to argue the points.

“What happened to ‘I want to win big’?” he asks instead, and Harvey is definitely never forgiving him for this.

“I do,” he agrees. “I always want to win big. And winning big means winning with you.”

Oops, peer pressure.

Shaking his head, Mike steps away, back to the window. He tousles his hair, laughing instead of crying.

“You always gave me too much credit,” he says to himself, which is at least a step too far.

“I sure as shit didn’t,” Harvey corrects. “But you kept… _proving_ yourself, you kept raising that bar. You put yourself on this two-way street, Mike, you earned my loyalty to you. You’ve earned my trust.” He bites his tongue; might as well go all in. “And I’ve never been in prison, and you know about as much about parole as I do, but if there’s anything I can do for you, anything you need that I can give, you got it. No matter what.”

Turning back, Mike lowers his hands from his head; his arms fall to his sides, dead weights hanging from his shoulders. Harvey puts his hands in his pockets and waits for everything to finish falling into place.

It takes a minute, but there it is. The light in his eyes, the set of his jaw, the straightening of his spine.

Then something new.

Reaching out, Mike takes Harvey’s face in his hands and spares a second to dart a glance to his lips before he pulls them together. He kisses with fervor, with intention, and it’s over almost as quickly as it began.

Harvey meets Mike’s wide-eyed embarrassment with his usual aplomb (feeling nothing of the sort) before Mike drops his head to Harvey’s clavicle.

“Fuck,” he mutters, which Harvey finds to be somewhat of an overstatement. Sliding his hand up Mike’s back to his neck, he tries to give at least the impression of an embrace.

“It’s okay,” he says. He might not know too much about the specifics of prison culture, but he does know about the emotional deadness it fosters. For Mike, poor, sensitive, passionate Mike, it’s as good as a death sentence. This sort of overflow is only to be expected.

“It’s really not,” Mike says. The lack of elaboration is the thing that makes Harvey nervous.

“Yeah it—”

“I’m in love with you.”

Oh.

Oh wow.

Didn’t see that one coming.

Harvey leans back, withdrawing his hand.

“What?”

Mike raises his head with a dreadful sort of resignation. “I’m in—”

“No, I heard you.” Harvey shifts his back foot, widens his stance. “Just—‘what.’”

Oh, nicely done, Mister Specter.

Mike draws away, shaking his head. “I’m sorry, I, I shouldn’t’ve said anything, I— Don’t worry about it, I’ll start looking at real estate tomorrow, be out of your hair in a couple days.”

“Mike, Mike, no—”

“Seriously, Harvey!” Mikes waves his arm dramatically, diverting Harvey’s efforts to take hold of him and pacing in the general direction of the front door. “I’m sorry, okay? I shouldn’t’ve said anything, don’t worry about it. Thanks for the job offer, I’ll get back to you.”

“God dammit, Mike!” Reaching across the gap, Harvey grabs him anyway, scowling in the face of Mike’s startled fear. “This isn’t a goddamn movie, you gotta give me a minute.”

It occurs to Harvey then that holding Mike, confining him, yanking him around at such a charged moment is a spectacularly bad idea, so he drops his hand away; their gazes lock across the gap and it’s concerning to see that Mike is breathing heavily, too.

Mike breaks first.

“Look, Harvey,” he says thinly, turning his head and pressing the heel of his hand to his eye. “I can’t… I owe you everything, okay? From the moment we met and you didn’t have me arrested to the moment I kissed you and you didn’t throw me off the balcony, I… You’ve done everything for me. You’re right,” he admits, spreading his hands before him, “the one-eighties in my life, the good times and the bad, it’s all been the stuff that set me on the path I’m on now, the stuff that made my life mean something. And the stuff that led me to you. So I’m sorry, okay, and thank you for everything you’ve ever done, and offered to do, and tried to do, and thought of doing, and…I’ll be in touch.”

Shaking his head, Harvey puts his hands in his pockets.

“Where do you think you’re going to go?”

Mike grabs his suit jacket out of the hall closet.

“I’ll figure it out.”

The door falls shut, not quite a slam.

Well. That didn’t work out exactly as intended.

\---

The bed is kind of stupidly big for one person.

Harvey stares up at the ceiling, the smooth matte finish picking up shadows and pinpricks of light thrown by clouds and an airplane passing in front of the moon, cars zipping by on the streets far below with their high-beams turned up and their engines revving.

Outside this room, the apartment is empty.

Outside this apartment, Mike is…somewhere.

Harvey looks out the window, the edges of the Brooklyn skyline glowing in the distance. Would he have gone back there? Hiked all the way across the Williamsburg Bridge, or taken the bike? His bike? (He knows that’s what it is, doesn’t he?) There’s nothing for him there, nowhere to go back to but for his old Gowanus stomping grounds, a laundry list of painful memories and stern reminders.

Maybe he went to Rachel’s place, the house he bought for his grandmother at the worst possible time and somehow managed to make into a home for himself without dying inside. Rachel would let him in, let him sleep on the couch; hell, she might even try to convince him that their relationship is suddenly worth resuscitating, though Harvey can’t imagine that ending well for either of them.

Maybe he’s in the lobby. Maybe he couldn’t bring himself to leave.

What are you, delusional?

Harvey plants his feet on the floor, sighs long and loud. The road to hell, he thinks insipidly; if he hadn’t invited Mike to stay in the first place, what would have happened then? If he hadn’t offered the consulting job, if he hadn’t offered his unconditional support, if he hadn’t tried to make things easy.

He walks thoughtlessly to the liquor cabinet. It’s a four-fingers kind of night.

Whiskey, neat.

Play it again, Sam.

\---

On Thursday, the day after Mike walks out, Harvey delegates all his meetings to the senior partners and buries himself in paperwork, realizing at three forty-two that he forgot to break for lunch. At seven twenty, when it occurs to him that it’s gotten rather dark outside, he thinks about calling it quits for the day; Louis is gone, Gretchen too, and Donna is filing her nails disinterestedly, waiting for marching orders she may or may not decide to follow. There are a few aspirational associates still in the bullpen, but that’s nothing unusual.

Harvey presses the intercom button.

“What’s up?” Donna says instantly, though she doesn’t drop her emery board.

“Go home,” he commands. She looks inquiringly through the glass.

“Don’t worry about me,” he says.

As she leans back, her brow furrows thoughtfully.

“You know that doesn’t make me worry any less,” she replies eventually.

“It never makes anyone worry any less,” he says. “Go home.”

Slowly gathering her purse, she leaves with a backward glance.

Harvey doesn’t look at the clock again.

After awhile, he draws the blackout shades and lies down on the couch.

Awhile after that, he’s glad he keeps a couple of bottles of quality scotch in the cabinet under his vinyl.

\---

On Friday, two days after Mike walks out, Harvey makes the executive decision (his right as a managing partner) to leave Specter Litt at three thirty-three, which is a nice symmetrical number, and wishes Donna and Gretchen a nice weekend, and conveniently forgets to apologize to Louis for cutting out early.

The elevator ride to the lobby is interminable for reasons he doesn’t remotely understand.

The car ride home feels dangerous for reasons which echo without definition in the back of his mind.

Then Mike is idling in the lobby and everything makes a terrible sort of sense.

He looks horrified at Harvey’s sudden appearance, all wide eyes and frown lines, and Harvey suppresses his own emotions with every ounce of control in him as he waves Mike along toward the private elevator.

Twenty-one stories have never seemed so tall.

Mikes follows him out into the living room and stands awkwardly with his hands behind his back.

Harvey drops his briefcase on the coffee table and spreads his hands queryingly.

“Well?”

Mike shakes his head and isn’t quite able to suppress his grin.

“I tried,” he says. “I’m still trying, I swear. I’m…sorry I came back here, I wasn’t expecting to run into you.”

“Mike, I’m not mad that you’re here,” Harvey says as he drops his hands.

“But you’re mad that I left,” Mike finishes for him. Harvey raises his eyebrows; yes, obviously, now what are you going to do about it?

Mike sighs.

Buck up, pal.

“I miss us,” he admits. “I miss what we used to be and I feel like I fucked everything up and I’m sorry, okay, I really, really am. I shouldn’t have done what I did and I shouldn’t have said what I said and I shouldn’t have left, and I shouldn’t have come back, but I couldn’t think of anything else.” He looks at Harvey sternly, daring him to argue, to object, and shrugs deeply.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

They have something of a stare down as Harvey tries to reclaim the situation; it seems that Mike is mostly willing to go along with that plan.

He sits when Harvey glances at the chairs, scowling when Harvey doesn’t follow suit.

“Mike,” Harvey says, pouring a rocks glass of single malt, “how serious were you?”

Mike frowns with the wariness of one who knows he’s stepping into a trap but can’t see a better alternative.

“When I said I was in love with you?” he clarifies, and Harvey deigns to nod. The situation is part otherworldly, part terrifying, but he forges ahead with precious little to lose: “Hundred percent. Head over heels, I’m a lost cause.”

Harvey pours a second glass and hums a quiet acknowledgement. It’s the expected answer; when Mike loves things, he does it freely and intensely, his greatest weakness and his greatest strength.

“You can understand how I might’ve been,” Harvey says, “at the very least, surprised to hear that.”

“Yes…” Mike draws the word out, leaning sideways to accept the offered scotch.

Harvey takes a sip of his own drink; he’s delaying this on purpose, though he really shouldn’t.

“I’d like to know exactly how you were hoping that night was gonna end.”

Mike twists his wrist to watch the liquor slide against the glass. “Honestly by that point I was just hoping not to be thrown out on the street.”

Harvey nods, peering at a point on the horizon out the window in that way he does sometimes when he’s got a situation in the bag because his opponent has just said something remarkably stupid.

“You know you weren’t.”

“What?”

Waving vaguely, Harvey juts his chin toward the outdoors. “Thrown out on the street.”

Sniffing and looking down at his lap, Mike nods. “Yeah, thanks for that.”

Harvey takes a moment to finish swallowing before his next question-that-isn’t-really.

“You know what that means.”

Mike leans back, tossing his free hand up. “You’re a hopeless romantic,” he says dryly. “Harvey, I get it, I was the one who walked out, I’m sorry, and I appreciate you not having me arrested even though I basically stalked you home but I swear—”

“It means I think we need to be honest with each other,” Harvey cuts in. He waits for Mike to respond, watching him out of the corner of his eye, but he’s either too confused or too cautious; the sudden tension in his posture indicates the latter.

“You have to make this difficult, don’t you,” Harvey says. “You know, for such an observant guy, you seem to have missed that I haven’t slept very well the last couple nights. Since you left.”

“My bad?”

Rolling his eyes, Harvey turns away from the window, walking past Mike’s chair. “I was worried about you, moron.”

Mike shifts around to look up at him, angling slightly backwards. “I know I just got out of prison, but I'm still an adult, I can take care of myself.”

“And that means I’m not allowed to worry?”

“What are you, my big brother?”

“God I hope not.”

Even Harvey isn’t sure if he’s trying to be funny. The conversation is so much like old times that it just feels natural; it feels too easy for this, for now.

They wait in stilted silence until it becomes unbearable.

“Mike…look.” Harvey heads back to the coffee table to deposit his empty glass and turns to face Mike, unbuttoning and rebuttoning his jacket. “I worried about you. I missed you. Not ‘I miss working with you,’ I missed _you._ ” He laughs quietly at himself. “And that was just in the last two days. Forget the last two years.”

“Five hundred and forty-one days,” Mike mutters. Harvey winces at the reminder.

“Yeah.”

The silence isn’t quite so bad this time, or quite so long.

“I’m not an idiot,” Mike says then. “I know you don’t have great experiences with long-term relationships, I wasn’t expecting you to hand over a promise ring.” Harvey smiles and Mike doesn’t return the favor.

“I just didn’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

The wrong idea, is that what this is?

In a sense.

On the other hand:

“You know how you planned to be a lawyer before you even got into college?” Harvey asks. Mike nods hesitantly, and he goes on: “And then you got expelled and you thought that career path had closed forever.”

“Yeah, thanks, that’s great, you got a point coming up soon?” Mike asks rhetorically, but Harvey just waves him off.

“You remember when I hired you and you were all,” Harvey wrings his hand and squints, searching for the word, “bravado and showing off, because you thought the rug would be yanked out any second, so you needed to make the best of it while it lasted?”

“Seriously, Harvey, you’re not—”

“It was something you’d wanted for so long that once it was finally in front of you,” Harvey interrupts, “you didn’t trust it. You were afraid of it. And you went all in, because that’s what you do, you dive in headfirst and you give it everything you’ve got until it all goes to shit, but there was always that little doubt. You remember that?”

Mike drums his fingers against his forehead.

“Yes, Harvey, I remember that, thank you for bringing it up.”

He might be agitated, but at least he’s paying attention.

“I’m saying I didn’t know how to handle it when the thing I’d wanted for so long that I could never have was suddenly being handed to me,” Harvey enunciates, watching Mike’s expression segue from anger to confusion to incredulity. “I said I needed a minute, and I wasn’t kidding. Two days was a little much, but, you know, at least now I know where I stand.”

Mike’s fingers arc spider-like over the armrests, twitching as he looks up at Harvey warily.

“And where’s that?”

Harvey looks out the window again, suddenly modest, and gives himself a beat. Sighing a puff of air, he squares his shoulders.

“Whatever you’re expecting out of a relationship,” he warns, “whatever you built up in your head watching me with Scottie, whatever you had with Rachel, I won’t be it.”

Pausing to consider his response, Mike pushes himself out of his seat and stands in front of Harvey, waiting for their eyes to meet before he speaks.

“I don’t even sort of want what you had with Scottie,” he says. “And what I had with Rachel, I mean, we didn’t last for a reason.”

“And you think we will,” Harvey can’t resist putting in.

Searching Harvey’s face for clues, Mike abruptly remembers his parents, his mother, and understands how risky this must seem on top of their history, how certain Harvey must be that even well-intentioned relationships are doomed to collapse at some point or another. (‘Til death do us part, Mike’s mind unhelpfully supplies before he can shake it off.)

“I think,” he ventures, “that you know me pretty well. You’ve seen me at my best and my worst, and my worst-worst, and you’ve been there to congratulate me, sort of, when I deserved it, and you’ve been there to support me when I needed it, no matter how rough it was in there,” (and you know what I mean,) “but you’ve also been there to tell me when I need to get my head out of my ass, to push me to do better even when I didn’t think I had it in me.”

“Someone has to keep you in line.”

Mike’s lips twitch into a shadow of a smile.

“And I’m still kind of down there at the bottom of the barrel, and…you’re still here, you haven’t left,” he adds, less anxiously. “But I’ve definitely seen you at your best, and I’ve seen you at, you know, pretty low,” (Harvey opens his mouth to protest, but Mike doesn’t let him,) “and I fell for you in spite of and because of all of it.” He tips his head down, staring at the hardwood, but this is something that ought to be said face to face. (At least Harvey looks nervous too.)

“So whatever you’ve got to offer, Harvey Reginald Specter,” he can’t resist the taunt, “I’m all in.”

As though anything about this is easy, the nervousness vanishes all at once; Harvey smiles his cocksure smile, unbuttoning his jacket again and sliding it off his shoulders this time, draping it over the chair by his side. His eyes crinkle at the corners, glinting in the lamplight, and Mike can’t remember a time before that he ever felt so certain and so uncertain at the same time.

“You sound pretty sure of yourself there,” Harvey says, part teasing, part cautionary tale. Mike nods as he knows Harvey expects him to.

“I think I’ve earned the right.” His gaze flickers down to Harvey’s lips and Harvey’s smile deepens, so Mike shuffles a little closer.

“I’d really like to kiss you right now.”

“What’s stopping you?” Harvey asks, watching the space between them shrink.

Mike drapes his arms around Harvey’s shoulders.

“Very little,” he murmurs.

Mike lunges across the gap and Harvey accepts him greedily, holding steady and sliding his hands up Mike’s back to his shoulder blades, tasting traces of scotch on his teeth, the same on his own as he swipes his tongue across Mike’s lower lip. Mike moves like he’s been dying for it, and they keep kissing until Harvey can’t taste the scotch anymore, until he begins to feel lightheaded and Mike is completely wrapped around his body with one of his hands cradling Harvey’s jaw and the other in Harvey’s back pocket.

“Shit,” Harvey gasps, turning his head just slightly. “You don’t do anything halfway, do you.”

Mike blurts out a muddled giggle, pressing his face into Harvey’s neck and melting into his embrace. “Apparently.”

Threading his fingers into Mike’s hair, Harvey leans away and tips Mike’s head to look him in the eye. “What’ve you been doing the last couple days?”

Lowering his gaze, Mike tries to brush the question off. “Thinking,” he says, then bites down on a smile. “I applied for a job at Pizza Hut—just for fun, you know, I wasn’t gonna take it. Not that it mattered, they said I ‘wasn’t what they were looking for.’”

“Code for ‘too accomplished,’” Harvey supplies, and Mike nods.

“Yeah, I got that.”

It’s not that it isn’t a cute story, or even useful information to have, but when Mike shivers slightly, Harvey realizes that it wasn’t what he was trying to get at.

He strokes his thumb along Mike’s cheekbone, up to the corner of his eye. “When was the last time you ate?”

Mike rolls his eyes skyward (as if he doesn’t remember). “When was the last time I was here?”

For fuck’s sake.

“Alright, you degenerate,” Harvey says, prying himself (with some difficulty) from Mike’s clutches to fumble in his jacket pocket for his cell phone. “And pace yourself, okay, I don’t want you throwing up all over my furniture.”

Mike kisses the back of Harvey’s neck before falling into the couch cushions and grinning unrepentantly. “You got it.”

Harvey cradles the phone to his ear and smiles back.

The one-eighties are the parts that make life worth living.

\---

It’s another late night at the esteemed law offices of Specter Litt LLP.

Mike doesn’t begrudge Harvey working as hard as he does; on the contrary, he admires his sense of duty and purpose. Besides, it’s not like it happens every night; last Friday, Harvey came home at eight and they had a proper Chinese-takeout-and- _Mississippi Burning_ evening in. Anyway, Mike is out nearly all day every day too, and he imagines Harvey is getting sick of his refrains of “No, I haven’t heard from them yet, or them either” and “Would you give it a rest, for fuck’s sake, I’m trying.”

Then there’s the fact that it’s nice to be alone every now and again.

Solitude is a precious commodity.

He’s gotten much better at blocking out the dull roar that sounds in his ears whenever it gets too quiet.

Curled on top of the covers, Mike closes his laptop and fumbles around to grab a pillow and shove it under his head. He doesn’t really expect to receive any job offers at quarter to midnight, but two weeks of nonresponses and exactly three “Dear Mister Ross, Thank you for your interest but unfortunately et cetera et cetera” form letters have made him just the right combination of depressed and hopeful to prompt him to check his email thirty-six times a day, regardless of the hour.

Granted, the Peace Corps had been more of a sarcastic whim than anything he sincerely expected to pan out, but he’d hoped for an interview invitation from at least one of the seventy-odd corporations and nonprofits he’d sent his résumé. The Legal Aid Society, that should’ve been a slam dunk, they should’ve been _begging_ to put him on the payroll.

“We believe that your distinguished corporate background does not match our dedication to providing legal representation to low-income clientele.”

Mike curls up tighter as his face flushes and a little nausea churns his gut.

“Distinguished.” What a nice way to put it.

Burrowing into the covers, he remembers the last time he was in a situation like this, remembers all the bills piled up at his doorstep, the hospital charges and nursing home fees threatening to evict him from his filthy apartment and ship his grandmother off to some shithole upstate. He should be grateful.

He tries to be grateful.

The front door closes with a modest noise that likely wouldn’t have woken him if he’d been asleep. Maybe. Fifty-fifty.

Some habits are harder to break.

Harvey knocks gently and Mike closes his eyes.

“Hey,” he calls. After a second or two, Harvey opens the door and comes in. Sitting at the foot of the bed, he strokes his palm down Mike’s back.

“You didn’t need to stay up,” he says wearily. Mike closes his eyes tighter before he opens them.

“I know.”

Harvey drops his hands into his lap and sighs.

“How was your day?”

“Not as bad as yours, I bet,” Mike ventures, squirming up to sit by Harvey’s side and look at him more carefully. Harvey has tried hard to keep from bringing his work home, but Mike’s been able to gather that one of his biggest and newest clients is suddenly throwing up massive roadblocks in his own case and Harvey hasn’t been able to figure out why. (It sounds like a fun puzzle, actually, but Mike doesn’t want to trample somewhere he doesn’t belong.)

Harvey laughs briefly. “Not a competition,” he says. “So you haven’t heard from anybody else yet?”

Mike turns away and scowls, and Harvey winces.

“Forget I asked.”

Would that I could.

Let’s talk about something else.

“I have a meeting with Lisa tomorrow.”

Harvey nods as he takes a moment to remember who Mike is talking about.

“She hasn’t called here, has she?”

Mike shakes his head. “I haven’t heard from her since I last saw her.” He bunches the comforter fabric in his fist and chews on the inside of his cheek.

“Harvey, what am I gonna tell her?”

Harvey reaches up to massage his shoulder.

“That you’re trying your best.”

Sagging against Harvey’s side, Mike wonders if that’s true.

Harvey presses his lips to the top of Mike’s head and lets him sit there a little while longer.

Sleep well.

\---

Mike is only thirty-six minutes early this time.

Officer Cassidy tips his head in acknowledgement when Mike passes; his days must be excruciatingly dull. Mike hustles past and doesn’t quite have it in him to care.

He lingers in the hall as some guy in his sixties, maybe, wearing a clean but ill-fitting suit and smelling like he could use a shower strolls out of Lisa’s office with an apathetic sort of aimlessness about him. Mike takes a shallow breath and opens the door.

“Mister Ross,” Lisa says coolly, shoving a stack of papers into the filing cabinet beneath her desk. Mike sits opposite her and waits.

Her movements are stiffer, more deliberate than he remembers. She’s more frustrated; with no actual context, he attributes it to the appointment before his and resolves to meet her where she’s at. It’s not like his week’s been going so great, either.

She folds her hands on the desk before her and smiles tightly.

“Have you had any police contact or engaged in any illegal activity since your release?” she asks in a weirdly sarcastic tone. She thinks he’s an idiot, that’s what this is about.

“No ma’am,” he replies, equally sarcastic, and she narrows her eyes in a way that makes it clear she doesn’t appreciate his attitude.

The next question is loaded with spite: “Have you found gainful full-time employment?”

It’s on the tip of his tongue. “No,” he should say. “I haven’t,” he should admit. “I’ve been looking every minute of every day and sending résumés and references everywhere and I haven’t had a single fucking bite because no one wants to take a chance on a fuck-up like me and did you know I used to be a drug runner because I think I might go back to that if the man I love wouldn’t be just so goddamn disappointed,” might be an inch too far.

“Yes ma’am,” he says.

Fuck.

A line of sweat breaks out at the back of his neck.

Fuck fuck fuck.

She raises her eyebrows, leaning forward just slightly. “Is that so.” She wants him to respond with something snide, he hears it in her voice, sees it in her bearing, but he won’t give her the satisfaction, and after a minute she backs down, reaching into the filing cabinet for a form and clipping it to a board to shove at him. “Congratulations,” she says blandly, exhaustion replacing her combative malice in one fell swoop. “Fill out this form in legible print. Black ink only.”

Without asking for her favor, Mike snatches a pen out of the steel mesh canister beside her computer; he doesn’t look to see if she’s impressed or irritated by his bravado.

NAME: Michael James Ross

PLACE OF EMPLOYMENT: Specter Litt LLP

POSITION: Consultant

He isn’t quite sure what he expects to happen as he writes the firm’s address below; Harvey to barge in and tell him the offer expired yesterday, maybe, or Lisa to read his writing upside down and tell him he’s not allowed to go back to work at the place that got him into this mess in to begin with.

She barely even glances at the form when she takes it back, stuffing it into a file in her cabinet.

“You haven’t moved?” she asks in a way that means “You haven’t been kicked out yet?”

It makes him feel shy and uncertain for stupid reasons that he hopes don’t show on his face.

“No ma’am,” he says.

She types for what feels like an hour (not possible), and he recognizes the expression she directs at him when she finishes. It’s the same “What are you still doing here” expression she was so fond of at their last meeting; he has the sense that he’ll be on the receiving end more than a few times into the future.

“Anything else?” she asks, and he shakes his head.

“Have a nice day,” he says.

She gives him a funny sort of smile.

He quits while he’s ahead.

\---

Mike means to go back to Harvey’s place, really he does.

It’s just that somehow when he gets to East Sixth, he forgets to take a left, and then before he knows it he’s already at thirty-ninth street and by that point it just makes more _sense_ to go all the way to fifty-third and Lex, and Mike is a reasonably sensible adult at least _most_ of the time.

The security guard at the front desk doesn’t recognize him, but to be fair, Mike doesn’t recognize her, either. He nearly tells her that Harvey Specter is expecting him, but that’s bound to end poorly; in the end, he hopes that Donna’s extension hasn’t changed (it hasn’t) and the guard gives him a pass to the fiftieth floor (with only the mildest suspicion directed at his bike helmet and lack of briefcase).

The layout hasn’t changed at all, and though he doesn’t know the young man seated at reception, flashing his visitor badge with a dismissive air as he strolls past has the desired effect of his being left alone.

There’s the hall he walked down with his box of photographs and memorabilia, his fake credentials and his fake degree. There’s the conference room he stopped in front of when the suits showed up out of fucking nowhere and Michael James Ross, you’re under arrest for conspiracy to commit fraud.

“Sir?”

The lights were on in that empty conference room at the end of the day for no reason, no reason at all, just waiting for him to come by and take one last look at this place, this place that had done so much for him and this place where it was all torn away.

“Sir? Is everything alright?”

Rachel stood by that elevator, the one he just rode up a moment ago, and she had that horrified expression on her face like everything she’d ever wanted had been right at her feet and suddenly yanked back (you don’t know, you don’t know).

“Sir, would you like me to call someone?”

What? What, what?

“You’re here to see Miss Paulsen?”

What, yes, yes, shut up.

Mike nods, puts on the most confident smile he can muster (not very), and starts walking.

“Just getting my bearings, thanks.”

The walls assemble a maze that he knows by heart, a convoluted mess of concrete and glass that has a formidableness on top of its familiarity, little touches slightly off, just a bit of this-should-be-facing-that-way, has-that-always-been-red, why-is-that-door-open. He walks the halls past rushing associates and overconfident junior partners, keeping to himself and hoping to be ignored; his path is a beeline for Harvey’s office (the same old one; evidently no one can bring themselves to move into Jessica’s) and he stops in his tracks when he sees Donna at her desk, glamorous as ever, typing away and glancing over the divide every few seconds.

She spots him before he can run for it.

_This is about us starting our life right._

Their staring contest lasts forty-five seconds (exactly) before she stands, sashaying over and grabbing him in a tight embrace. He freezes (this is normal, normal, everything is fine), and she beams at him when she lets go.

“It’s good to see you, Mike,” she says quietly.

He nods, as expected.

“You too.”

She smiles again and tosses her hair approximately toward the glass walls of Harvey’s office. “I didn’t tell him you were here.”

Mike wonders how much Harvey’s told her about him, about them, as he quirks his lips into a smirk, pretending their conspiracy was somehow planned.

“Thanks.”

She nods with a wink and returns to her desk.

Mike waits for someone to tell him what to do.

Harvey’s still focused on the papers he’s poring over.

A phone begins to ring. And ring, and ring, and ring.

Shit—

“Hello?”

“Doctor Chilton, I presume.”

Mike looks up nervously; Harvey’s still looking down at his papers, but he’s got a little smirk on his face, and when Mike looks more closely, he notices that the speaker phone light is on.

_This way, please._

Thank you.

He thumbs the disconnect on his phone and slides it back in his pocket as he makes his way through Harvey’s door.

“We get a lot of detectives in here, but I must say I can’t ever remember one as attractive,” he quips, leaning back on his heels. Harvey’s smile widens.

“I’m not saying you’re not the prettiest princess,” he says, scribbling a note in the margin of the document he’s reviewing. “But what the hell are you doing here?”

Good question.

Mike looks out the window and has the sense that he’s made a terrible mistake.

Harvey’s watching him now, part imploring (tell me what’s wrong) and part dissecting (let me figure out what’s going on).

Tick, tock, tick.

“Mike?”

Mike closes his eyes and breathes deep.

Dive in headfirst (that’s what you do).

“Well I work here, don’t I?”

Whatever Harvey was expecting, that wasn’t it.

It should be good news, shouldn’t it? Mikes thinks that’s how he meant it. How he meant it to be read, anyway, whatever his feelings are on the matter (he still hasn’t quite figured that part out).

Leave it to Harvey to read between the lines crammed in between the lines.

Sliding his hand to the intercom to his right, Harvey buzzes Donna.

“Tell Louis I’m taking the rest of the day,” he says cautiously.

“You got it, boss,” she replies.

Buzz, click.

The line goes dead.

Shit.

Mike swings his helmet over his shoulder.

This isn’t at all what he meant.

(Isn’t it, though?)

Stacking some of the files he was tearing into in his briefcase, Harvey marches out of his office; Mike follows because he’s supposed to, pretending not to notice Donna watching them out of the corner of her eye. (Does she know? Does she? Don’t they all?)

Mike makes it to the elevators first, breathing slightly heavier, slightly faster. Harvey puts his hand on his back when he catches up, a totally normal gesture (it’s just them), and Mike tries to control himself (it’s just them).

They’re in Harvey’s town car.

That was fast.

The ride back to Harvey’s place takes a little under fifteen minutes (he knows because he’s done it before). Mike clutches his bike helmet with his fingers slid into the vents; the bike is back at the office, chained to the rack in front of the garage. He remembers putting it there. (Good on you, Mike.)

Harvey keeps his hand on Mike’s elbow as they walk to his private elevator (twenty-one stories have never seemed so tall), out into the living room (so spacious, so clean). He keeps his hand on Mike’s elbow as they walk to the couch, as Mike sits, touches his arm as he hands him a glass of water.

“Mike,” Harvey says firmly. “Tell me what happened.”

What happened.

Mike shakes his head, his eyes losing focus as they lock onto the floor.

“She asked me,” he stutters. “She asked me if I had a job, she said ‘Have you found gainful full-time employment’ and I…I couldn’t say ‘no,’ I couldn’t do it.”

Harvey puts his hand on the cushion between them. (Stay back, give him some air.)

“Mike,” he says, “just keep breathing, okay?”

Mike closes his eyes tight and drops his elbows to his knees; water spills out of the glass and he puts it on the floor.

Just keep breathing.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

“Harvey, what am I going to do?” he asks (or he thinks he does, but he seems to have somehow transported himself to a different dimension).

“It’ll be alright,” Harvey says (thank god someone knows what to do). “It’ll be fine. You didn’t say anything that wasn’t true, it’s all gonna be fine.”

Mike tries to keep breathing, but it’s so hard (no weakness, no vulnerability); hesitantly, Harvey reaches out to touch his shoulder and Mike throws him off, a violent spasm of a reflex. Harvey scowls.

It’ll be alright. Give it a minute.

“Mike,” he says, “listen to me.”

Yes, sir.

“I offered you a job. Remember, I offered you a job and you told me you needed to think about it, Mike, and that was fine, remember I told you the firm is doing pretty well?” Harvey ducks his head a little and he would meet Mike’s eyes if they weren’t still closed. “We could really use you, but we can wait. It’s okay. We aren’t trying to fill a quota, you aren’t replacing anyone who left us in the lurch. The job will still be there for you whenever you’re ready.”

Oops, peer pressure.

Mike takes a shuddering breath, self-loathing disguised as suppression disguised as control. Harvey clenches his hand into a fist.

“It’s okay, Mike,” he ventures again, sort of knowing what he’s getting at, or getting into, but not entirely. “It’s okay. Whatever’s going on, whatever you’re thinking, just remember that you’re out of prison, you’re back here with your friends, and everything is gonna be okay. You went through hell, but we’ll figure out what happens next, you and me.”

Mikes nods, opening his eyes. They begin to glaze over immediately.

Everything is fine.

Tick, tock, tick.

Harvey reaches for him again, lays his hand on Mike’s shoulder. Mike doesn’t shake him off this time, and he squeezes gently.

“What do you need?”

Thank god for Harvey.

Mike shakes his head.

When he speaks, it’s without inflection.

“I don’t know what's wrong with me.”

If this was a goddamn movie, the answer would be “Nothing.” It wouldn’t be true, as it never is, but it would be correct. “Four stars!” raves the New York Times.

Harvey looks over Mike’s head at the private elevator, just because it’s there. He sighs.

He can’t do that to Mike.

“I don’t know either, but I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. Mike looks up at him, tipping his head just so, and Harvey grins like something is ironic.

“Whatever you’ve got to offer, Michael James Ross…”

He trails off.

Mike understands because he’s Mike, and he nods, accepting the sentiment (good enough for now).

Then he raises his hand to the back of Harvey’s head and leads him forward, pressing their lips tenderly together. When he keeps pressing in, Harvey lets him lower them both to the cushions, lets him settle down on Harvey’s chest as gravity does most of the work for them.

When they’re through, Harvey guides Mike to rest their foreheads together and goes a little cross-eyed.

“You know it’s different this time around,” he says. “You’re not just picking up where you left off, and this isn’t gonna be easy.”

“I know,” Mike says. He closes his eyes again, tucking his face against Harvey’s neck.

“But if you want to, we’ll figure it out. You and me.”

Harvey runs his thumb up Mike’s temple, in case he was thinking about crying. (He wasn’t, really.)

“You wanna go for it?”

(Do you? Are you sure?)

Eventually, Mike raises himself back up to resolutely look Harvey in the eye.

“With all due respect, sir,” he confides, “I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.”

Well that’s an awfully high bar to set. It’s way too optimistic, assuming Mike even believes his own hype.

Harvey trails his fingers along Mike’s jaw and back behind his ear.

Yeah, alright.

Let’s follow where this road leads, you and me.

We’re unstoppable.

**Author's Note:**

> A [panopticon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon) is a theoretical circular prison monitored from a central location whereby it’s impossible to view all inmates at once but any inmate may potentially be monitored at any time, supposedly encouraging them all to act lawfully. (Danbury Federal isn’t remotely a panopticon; Mike uses the term sardonically.)
> 
> The Tower is a generic term for the watchtower (often a security room) from which guards monitor a prison, typically via CCTV.
> 
> 25 Cooper Square is the address of the [Standard Hotel](http://www.standardhotels.com/new-york/properties/east-village), which is not an apartment building but it is where the view from Harvey’s balcony was filmed; Rachel and Mike’s apartment wasn’t introduced until Season Two, by which point the series had stopped filming in New York City, so I put them in the [Corinthian](http://corinthiancollection.com/), which is a big impressive apartment building with a big impressive lobby.
> 
> Fic title is from “You Only Live Once,” the _Yuri!!! on Ice_ ending theme.
> 
> “There's been a light burning in the window for you!” ( _His Girl Friday_ , 1940)  
> “Tonight, you pukes will sleep with your rifles.” ( _Full Metal Jacket_ , 1987)  
> “There's a time for daring and there's a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for.” ( _Dead Poets Society_ , 1998)  
> “Make the best of what we offer you, and you will suffer less than you deserve.” ( _Papillon_ , 1973)  
> “I always gagged on the silver spoon.” ( _Citizen Kane_ , 1941)  
> “Throw that junk in.” ( _Citizen Kane_ , 1941)  
> “Don’t ever argue with the big dog, because the big dog is always right.” ( _The Fugitive_ , 1993)  
>  _What’s a Nice Girl Like You Doing in a Place Like This?_ (1963)  
>  “Bill dropped his keys on the counter and stood there staring at them, suddenly thinking about all the times he'd thrown his keys there before and how many days of his life were wasted repeating the same tasks and rituals in his apartment over and over again. But then he wondered if, realistically, this was his life, and the unusual part was his time spent doing other things.” ( _It’s Such a Beautiful Day_ , 2012)  
> “Shut your damn mouth.” (“Doppelgängers,” _Parks and Recreation_ , 2013)  
>  _Play It Again, Sam_ (1969)  
>  “What’s stopping you?” “Very little.” (“Homer the Moe,” _The Simpsons_ , 2001)  
> “Doctor Chilton, I presume. I think you know each other.” ( _The Silence of the Lambs_ , 1991)  
> “You know, we get a lot of detectives in here, but I must say I can’t ever remember one as attractive.” ( _The Silence of the Lambs_ , 1991)  
> “With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.” ( _Apollo 13_ , 1995)
> 
> U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons. (2014). _Inmate Admission and Orientation Handbook_ (The Federal Correctional Institution—Danbury). Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
> 
> U.S. Department of Justice Federal Bureau of Prisons. (2015). _Institution Supplement_ (DAN 5267.08I FCI/FPC Visiting Regulations). Danbury, CT: Federal Correctional Institute.


End file.
